On 2008-05-23 05:38, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
> Raymond Hettinger <rhettinger@users.sourceforge.net> added the comment:
> 
> I don't think this is the right thing to do.  The hash algorithms are 
> defined in terms of bytes, but Unicode is an abstracted from a byte 
> level encoding.  It doesn't make sense to convert using an arbitrary 
> encoding (such as UTF-8) because someone else might hash the same text 
> using a different encoding.
> 
> Marc, do you concur?

Yes.

While we could fix an encoding to use for converting Unicode to
bytes, e.g. UTF-8, you clearly want hash functions to be portable
across platforms, programming languages and implementations.

Other languages or implementations might choose UTF-16 or some
other encoding, so it's not clear which encoding to choose and
there doesn't seem to be a standard for this either.

-1 on the idea. Martin already closed and rejected the idea for me.

Thanks,
-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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