> It's unfortunate that the default behaviour isn't > optimal at the interactive prompt for some configurations, though.
As I said, it's a trade-off. The alternative, if it was the default, wouldn't be optimal at the interactive prompt for some other configurations. In particular, users of non-latin scripts have been complaining that they can't read their strings - hence the change, which now actually allows these users to read the text that is stored in the strings. The question really is why John Machin has a string that contains '\u9876' (which is a Chinese character), yet his terminal is incapable of displaying that character. More likely, people will typically encounter only characters in their data that their terminals are also capable of displaying (or else the terminal would be pretty useless) In the long run, it might be useful to have an error handler on sys.stdout in interactive mode, which escapes characters that cannot be encoded (perhaps in a different color, if the terminal supports colors, to make it clear that it is an escape sequence) Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
