The problem I see here is that there is no public way to simply get a C string from a unicode object similar to PyBytes_AsString() for bytes. That's bad because we don't want to rewrite the whole code to duplicate strings all the time and free every string we get from a MyPyUnicode_AsString() like function.

I used the following, but this clearly has a memory leak:


  static const char *MyPyUnicode_AsString(PyObject *op) {
      PyObject *bytes = PyUnicode_AsEncodedString(op,0,0);
      return bytes ? PyBytes_AS_STRING(bytes) : 0;
  }

I now use the following which has no memory leak, but needs an internal function (I would use _PyUnicode_AsString, but I need Python 2.X compatibility as well):

  static const char *MyPyUnicode_AsString(PyObject *op) {
      PyObject *bytes = _PyUnicode_AsDefaultEncodedString(op, 0);
      return bytes ? PyBytes_AS_STRING(bytes) : 0;
  }

So could something be done about this?