On 21 Okt, 22:39, "Martin v. Löwis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > It's not possible to "fix" this - it isn't even broken. The *db modules, > by design, support storing of arbitrary bytes, not just character data. > You can put images into them, or sound files, java byte code files, etc. > So if Python would assume they have to be UTF-8 encoded character > strings, it would severely limit the usability of these modules.
If the inquirer was aware of the Unicode/UTF-8 distinction, then he apparently wanted a conversion from Unicode to UTF-8 for the purpose of storing text in the database. I don't really see a problem with a module like this handling Unicode values in a reasonable fashion whilst letting the user supply plain/byte strings if they also want to do so, except perhaps for the issue of whether retrieved values should be Unicode or something else, how the user gets to override the default behaviour, and how this fits in with the existing API. Various DB-API modules support Unicode, so this isn't a completely new phenomenon, and a connection parameter for alternative encodings would be adequate if people wanted to use something other than UTF-8 to represent textual values within the database. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list