On 28 Nov, 21:03, Terry Reedy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > It is the (default) ascii encoder that does not like non-ascii chars. > I suspect that is you encode to bytes first with an encoder that does > work (latin-???), md5 will be happy.
I know that the "Python roadmap" answer to such questions might refer to Python 3.0 and its "strings are Unicode" features, and having seen this mentioned a lot recently, I'm surprised that no-one has done so at the time of writing, but I do wonder whether good old Python 2.x wouldn't benefit from a more explicit error message in these situations. Since the introduction of Unicode in Python 1.6/2.0, I've always tried to make the distinction between what I call "plain strings" or "byte strings" and "Unicode objects" or "character strings", and perhaps the UnicodeEncodeError message should be enhanced to say what is actually going on: that an attempt is being made to convert characters into byte values and that the chosen way of doing so (which often involves the default, ASCII encoding) cannot manage the job. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
