First off: i thoroughly enjoy python. I use it for scientific computing with scipy, numpy and matplotlib and it's an amazingly efficient and elegant language.
About this mailing list: it is very hard to search. I can't find any search field on the page: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/ python-list. I would greatly appreciate if you moved that list over to google, for instance, so that it be both searchable and rss-feedable. My question is the following: how to set a default encoding in python? I read an old thread about that and it didn't seem possible by then. The default encoding i wish to set is UTF-8 since it encodes unicode and is nowadays the standard encoding. Having ascii as a default encoding is a pretty strange choice since ascii encodes only 127 characters (suitable only for English, without fancy symbols like €) whereas utf-8 encodes virtually infinitely many characters (suitable for all languages). Besides, utf-8 is a superset of ascii so having it by default won't harm anything. At the very least there should be a configuration file that allows to set a default encoding (although setting anything else than utf-8 should be advised against). Such a feature would be greatly appreciated by all of us non native English speakers around the world. Best regards, == Olivier -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list