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classification
Title: Add a new 'surrogatereplace' output only error handler
Type: enhancement Stage: resolved
Components: Interpreter Core, Library (Lib) Versions: Python 3.5
process
Status: closed Resolution: rejected
Dependencies: Superseder:
Assigned To: Nosy List: ncoghlan, vstinner
Priority: normal Keywords:

Created on 2014-07-20 11:19 by ncoghlan, last changed 2022-04-11 14:58 by admin. This issue is now closed.

Messages (3)
msg223508 - (view) Author: Alyssa Coghlan (ncoghlan) * (Python committer) Date: 2014-07-20 11:19
This would be along the same lines as xmlcharrefreplace and backslashreplace, but only affect surrogate escaped characters.

Unlike surrogate escape, which reproduces the escaped characters directly in the data stream, this would follow the 'replace' error handler and insert an appropriately encoded '?' character in the output stream.

The use case would be any context where losing the escaped characters is preferred to either potentially injecting arbitrary binary data into the output (surrogateescape), failing with an exception (strict), or any of the other existing codecs.

It would differ from 'replace' in that normal code points that can't be encoded at all would still trigger an error.
msg225607 - (view) Author: Alyssa Coghlan (ncoghlan) * (Python committer) Date: 2014-08-21 12:35
Stephen Turnbull suggested on python-dev that this was a bad idea, and after reconsidering the current behaviour in Python 2, I realised that setting surrogateescape and letting the terminal deal with the consequences is exactly what we want.

What confused me is that ls replaces the unknown characters with question marks in the C locale:

$ ls
ニコラス.txt
$ LANG=C ls
????????????.txt


Python 2 passes the bytes through, regardless of locale:

$ python -c "import os; print(os.listdir('.')[0])"
ニコラス.txt
$ LANG=C python -c "import os; print(os.listdir('.')[0])"
ニコラス.txt


Current Python 3 gets confused if the C locale is set, as the encoding on sys.stdout gets set to "ascii", which breaks roundtripping:

$ python3 -c "import os; print(os.listdir('.')[0])"
ニコラス.txt                                   
$ LANG=C python3 -c "import os; print(os.listdir('.')[0])"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>           
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-11: ordinal not in range(128)

However, Python 3.5 will already set "surrogateescape" on sys.stdout by default, reproducing the behaviour of *Python 2*, rather than the behaviour of ls:
$ LANG=C ~/devel/py3k/python -c "import os; print(os.listdir('.')[0])"
ニコラス.txt
msg308565 - (view) Author: STINNER Victor (vstinner) * (Python committer) Date: 2017-12-18 14:36
Follow-up: the PEP 538 (bpo-28180) and PEP 540 (bpo-29240) have been accepted and implemented in Python 3.7!
History
Date User Action Args
2022-04-11 14:58:06adminsetgithub: 66215
2017-12-18 14:36:37vstinnersetnosy: + vstinner
messages: + msg308565
2014-08-21 12:35:21ncoghlansetstatus: open -> closed
type: enhancement
messages: + msg225607

resolution: rejected
stage: resolved
2014-07-20 11:19:14ncoghlancreate