Features/PythonEncodingUsesSystemLocale

Feature Name

Summary

Make Python use a locale-aware default string encoding (generally "UTF-8"), rather than hardcoding "ascii".

Owner

• Name: Dave Malcolm

• Email: <dmalcolm@redhat.com>

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 41
• Last updated: (DATE)
• Percentage of completion: XX%

Detailed Description

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=243541

Currently Fedora's python implementation uses ascii Python's site.py includes this fragment of code:

def setencoding():
    """Set the string encoding used by the Unicode implementation.  The
    default is 'ascii', but if you're willing to experiment, you can
    change this."""
    encoding = "ascii" # Default value set by _PyUnicode_Init()
    if 0:
        # Enable to support locale aware default string encodings.
        import locale
        loc = locale.getdefaultlocale()
        if loc[1]:
            encoding = loc[1]
    if 0:
        # Enable to switch off string to Unicode coercion and implicit
        # Unicode to string conversion.
        encoding = "undefined"
    if encoding != "ascii":
        # On Non-Unicode builds this will raise an AttributeError...
        sys.setdefaultencoding(encoding) # Needs Python Unicode build !  

It is proposed to change the first conditional to if 1: so that Fedora's Python by default reads the locale from the environment and uses that encoding. This will generally mean UTF-8 is used, rather than ascii.

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/YourFeatureName