Re: Counter intuitive default value for 'allow_unicode' in PyYAML

Peter Murphy <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.text.yaml.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 1:37 AM, Andrey Somov <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello,
> the biggest value of YAML is good readability.  A document full of "\xDCber"
> can not be read by humans...

All,

I sympathize with both sides of the debate.

I agree with Andrey's definition of "readable". Unfortunately, there
are many environments where printing a good old fashioned umlaut U
will get one into strife (e.g., on Windows XP). Doing such a thing
will throw a "not an ascii character" exception - leaving the
developer none the wiser. There are ways around it, but it's one
hassle that people shouldn't face by default.

I agree with Kirill - the default is safer. At this stage, changing it
may break existing systems using PYYaml.

However, there is one thing I suggest Kirill could do: provide more
explicit documentation about the "allow_unicode" option here.

http://pyyaml.org/wiki/PyYAMLDocumentation

It's more help for the people happy printing Cyrillic and Greek and
IPA and whatnot - those that do not want "\u" and "\x" in their
breakfast.

Cheers,
Peter

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