First off: i thoroughly enjoy python. I use it for scientific
computing with scipy, numpy and matplotlib and it's an amazingly
efficient and elegant language.
About this mailing list: it is very hard to search. I can't find any
search field on the page: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/
python-list. I would greatly appreciate if you moved that list over
to google, for instance, so that it be both searchable and rss-feedable.
My question is the following: how to set a default encoding in
python? I read an old thread about that and it didn't seem possible
by then.
The default encoding i wish to set is UTF-8 since it encodes unicode
and is nowadays the standard encoding. Having ascii as a default
encoding is a pretty strange choice since ascii encodes only 127
characters (suitable only for English, without fancy symbols like €)
whereas utf-8 encodes virtually infinitely many characters (suitable
for all languages). Besides, utf-8 is a superset of ascii so having
it by default won't harm anything.
At the very least there should be a configuration file that allows to
set a default encoding (although setting anything else than utf-8
should be advised against). Such a feature would be greatly
appreciated by all of us non native English speakers around the world.
Best regards,
== Olivier