On Tue, Apr 24, 2018, at 04:33, Pekka Klärck wrote:
> 
> Pekka Klärck <pekka.klarck@gmail.com> added the comment:
> 
> I didn't submit this as a bug report but as an enhancement request. From 
> usability point of view, saying that results differ but you just cannot 
> see the difference is not very helpful.
> 
> The exact reason I didn't submit this as an enhancement request for 
> unittest, pytest, and all other modules/tools being affected is that 
> "I'm not sure if there's a good way to detect whether two unicode 
> strings are going to display confusingly similarly". Enhancing `repr()` 
> would be a logical solution to this problem.

I should have said "there's no way to unambiguously represent a particular  unicode string except as a sequence of integers, which isn't normally want anyone wants to see". This decomposition problem is only one of many. Even in ASCII land, fonts often have very similar glyphs for "l", "I", and "1".