On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Joshua Russo <josh.r.ru...@gmail.com>wrote:
> I was working through some regression tests and saw a scenario I thought > wasn't allowed/recommended. I was under the impression that if you specified > UTF-8 encoding at the top of the file you where not suppose to use u > decorated unicode static string. So instead of u'prédio' I use 'prédio' in > files where I specify the encoding in the file. > Now in regressiontests/admin_views/models.py I see u'¿Chapter?'. Does it > not matter if I use the u decorator on static strings with the encoding > specified? I was initially told that it could create problems. > > Someone told you wrong. The encoding declaration is useful specifically for unicode literals, see: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/. With the encoding declaration, the Python interpreter can build a unicode object correctly from the source bytes, since it knows the encoding of the source bytes. Without the encoding declaration, the interpreter would not know the encoding of the source bytes, so would be unable (without making some assumption) to correctly build unicode string objects from unicode literals. The encoding declaration does nothing helpful for bytestrings -- they are still bytestrings, with no known encoding carried around with them. Django code assumes utf-8 encoding for bytestrings so in many cases where you are using utf-8 as the encoding you can still use string literals instead of unicode literals. However there is no advantage to doing so and in fact using utf-8 string literals can cause problems in other places with code that assumes another encoding (e.g. ascii) for byte strings. Karen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
