[Zope3-dev] i18n, unicode, and string encoding

[sathya]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

>>I think  the string object should store its encoding  in an attribute. 
>>Why ? Given a string I would like to know what its encoding is . How can 
>>I do that now ?
>>    
>>
>
>You could subclass the str type, or you can create a class that
>contains a string and an encoding name (maybe subclassing UserString).
>
>But I challenge you and ask, why do you want to know its encoding?
>You shouldn't be carrying around encoded strings.  Instead, you should
>decode strings into Unicode.
>  
>
Hello Guido,
First of all I think I should ask myself If I want to take up  
challenges with you :)
anyway  I am going to let loose in the hope that  I will learn somthing new.
I can think of a byte array coming of a socket containing EBCIDIC  for 
instance . I want to store this in a string type and hand it off
to  a translation function that can translate from  EBCIDIC  to  ASCII 
 .storing the encoding in the string as an attribute will help the 
translation function. At this point I am thinking why should I pass this 
as a parameter to the translation function rather than store it as an 
attribute of the string object itself. The translation function knows it 
has to produce US-ASCII, so it looks at the encoding attribute of the 
input string and  figures out what to do from there.

>--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
>
>_______________________________________________
>Zope3-dev mailing list
>Zope3-dev@zope.org
>http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope3-dev
>  
>