[lug] Python and Unicode - Good Grief! (A Rant)

[Jed S. Baer]

On Tue, 7 Mar 2017 14:52:39 -0700
Steve Sullivan wrote:

> It might be worth trying python 3, if you're haven't already.
> In python 2 a lot of the string - unicode stuff was a pain.
> In python 3 the 'str' type is now unicode internally, and often
> the unicode stuff "just works"

Oh, it ended up being easy enough to deal with. But, being an old Fortran
programmer, stuff like this just boggles my mind. A file in Linux is
just a binary blob - doesn't know a character set from water ski.

I briefly scanned some material on 2.7 vs. 3, and concluded I'd stick
with 2.7. Though right now, I couldn't tell you why that was. The default
for the distro I'm using is  2.7, so if nothing else, it's easier.