I remember when this was first posted. RSS was new, Movable Type 2.x was hot shit, the future of the web was XML and real hackers were parsing it with regular expressions and duct tape. Everything was supposed to be Unicode, except the webdev community was 99.999% NorthAmerican and everybody knew plaintext "is supposed to be ASCII" anyway.
Fast forward 8 years... I've joined Stack Overflow about a week ago and my first accepted answer was about Unicode and string handling in Python 2.x. Just yesterday I was thinking I should reread this exact post, to refresh a few points and keep shooting fish in that barrel. I guess I should be grateful Python 3 has gone full-Unicode... except that now people ask how to emit ASCII with it. And the Python community is among the most clued-up on the subject (probably as a reaction to how bad it was handled in 2.x).
Fast forward 8 years... I've joined Stack Overflow about a week ago and my first accepted answer was about Unicode and string handling in Python 2.x. Just yesterday I was thinking I should reread this exact post, to refresh a few points and keep shooting fish in that barrel. I guess I should be grateful Python 3 has gone full-Unicode... except that now people ask how to emit ASCII with it. And the Python community is among the most clued-up on the subject (probably as a reaction to how bad it was handled in 2.x).
And I'm not even a fucking software developer.