Pragmatic Unicode, or, How do I stop the pain?

What people said

jteppinette · 2019-05 · Strong recommendation

You have to invest some time in understanding how strings (byte strings and unicode) work in Python. I put this off for way too long. After A TON OF PAIN I decided to put the time in to watch the talk "Pragmatic Unicode, or, How do I stop the pain?"[0] by Ned Batchelder and it all just clicked. Now, I make unicode sandwiches like a boss. [0] [VIDEO]

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ptx · 2015-01 · Recommendation

From a quick skimming through the docs[0], Perl 5.8's Unicode support sounds a lot like Python 2's except that the default encoding is latin1 instead of ASCII - i.e. unlike the Python 3 way of explicitly decoding binary data into Unicode text at the point where it's read (where presumably the encoding of the data is known), it will defer the decoding until the data is used (at some completely unrelated point in the program) and decode it with some assumed globally agreed upon encoding. Since there is no globally agreed encoding (Windows even has different legacy encodings between Win32 and the command prompt!) this will appear to work as long as the data is ASCII but later, when you least expect it (and someone inputs a non-ASCII string), give UnicodeDecodeError in Python 2 or garbage data in Perl 5.8. Ned Batchelder gave an excellent talk[1] that explains how the Python 3 approach to Unicode works. I think it makes a lot more sense once you understand it; the Python 2 way was clearly broken, and it looks like Perl 5 has the same problem but hides it better. [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]

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thanksgiving · 2017-11 · Reference

I don't know the details (because I don't understand unicode) but I am not sure what you said is possible. But to me ASCII seems like a hindrance. ``` fmt.Println("Hello, 世界") ``` This line of go lang looks beautiful. I bet they never have to worry about bytes vs Unicode. Here is python... [VIDEO] I'll add one more assertion to the list. People are born and people die. It is not fair for us to impose our mistakes and sins to the next generation. With that being said, my thought was simply all the scripts that are in python (even the simple build for Firefox was python 2 only last time I checked). The way forward for anyone new to python is for us to tell them: Python 2 doesn't matter. Don't look at it. Learn python by which I mean 3.0+ I still don't get why Google of all places can't support python 3 in its standard app engine. To me it sounds like standard is deprecated for the flexible (which doesn't have a free tier).

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