Changes between Version 2 and Version 3 of UnicodeDecodeError

Timestamp:

Mar 5, 2007, 11:31:19 AM (17 years ago)

Author:

Christian Boos

Comment:

clarify a bit the section about str.encode() triggering a UnicodeDecodeError

UnicodeDecodeError

@@ -28 +28 @@
 }}}
 
-A more subtle and confusing way to trigger this error is when trying to ''encode'' a sequence of bytes to a given encoding. Wait... encoding a sequence of bytes? Does that make sense? Well, no, normally it shouldn't, but Python "offers" you the `encode` method on `str` objects, as a shortcut to: `"string".encode() == unicode("string").encode()`. That could be called a `u"cadeau empoisonné"` ;-)
+A more subtle and confusing way to trigger this error is when trying to ''encode'' a sequence of bytes to a given encoding. Wait... encoding a sequence of bytes? Does that even make sense? Well, normally not, but Python interprets that as a shortcut for encoding the `unicode` object corresponding to this string. So we have the following equivalence: 
+{{{
+"string".encode(enc) == unicode("string").encode(enc)
+}}}
+That could be called a `u"cadeau empoisonné"` ;-)
 
 Of course, if `"string"` can't be first decoded the naive way in order to produce that temporary `unicode` object, it will trigger the same error we saw above: