[vtk-developers] Python 3 and unicode

[Ben Boeckel]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 08:53:30 -0400, Sean McBride wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 18:59:18 -0600, David Gobbi said:
> >Because I'm a utf-8 chauvinist, my main concern is that people who use
> >utf-8 don't have to do anything special.  It bothers me a bit that people
> >who use other encodings need to jump through these hoops, but I can live
> >with that.
> >
> >Any opinions, advice, or requests for clarification?
> 
> I guess I'm more of a "utf-8 chauvinist" than you are, because I don't
> even see what the problem is. :)
> 
> Why add any of the complication?  Just require people to use UTF-8.
> No other 8 bit encoding should be used in this day and age.  And there
> is no VTK+Py3 legacy to support, so let's not add a kludge now.

Agreed. Anyone using these *nix-originated languages (basically read as:
not the JVM, the CLR, or JavaScript) has to deal with utf-8 anyways, so
just assume it since there's little reason to prefer another encoding
over it.

This does bring the question of what we do for handling the JVM's utf-16
internal encodings for the Java wrappers. Do they also assume utf-8 at
the boundaries? I have no idea about Tcl.

We should probably add some utf-8-oriented tests while we're solving
this so that we don't break it in the future :) .

--Ben