>> That won't work, Victor, since it makes invalid encoding
>> names valid, e.g. 'utf(=)-8'.

> .. but this *is* valid: ...

Ah yes, it's because of encodings.normalize_encoding(). It's funny: we have 3 functions to normalize an encoding name, and each function does something else :-) E.g. encodings.normalize_encoding() doesn't replace non-ASCII letters, and don't convert to lowercase.

more_aggressive_normalization.patch changes all of the 3 normalization functions and add tests on encodings.normalize_encoding().

I think that speed and backward compatibility is more important than conforming to IANA or other standards.

Even if "~~ utf#8 ~~" is ugly, I don't think that it really matter that we accept it.

--

If you don't want to touch the normalization functions and just add more aliases in C fast-paths: we should also add utf8, utf16 and utf32.

Use of "utf8" in Python: random.Random.seed(), smtpd.SMTPChannel.collect_incoming_data(), tarfile, multiprocessing.connection (xml serialization)

PS: On error, UTF-8 decoder raises a UnicodeDecodeError with "utf8" as the encoding name :-)