News about repr() and 8-bit characters, and setlocale() in the
readline module.
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index 7ee918b..7321f60 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -66,6 +66,12 @@
Core and builtins
-----------------
+- The repr() function for 8-bit strings now preserves all characters
+ that are considered printable in the current locale. (Previously,
+ all bytes that are not printable ASCII would be encoded in hex.)
+ This requires the user to set the current locale; in the initial "C"
+ locale the old behavior is maintained. [SF patch 479898]
+
- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
@@ -348,6 +354,17 @@
Library
-------
+- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
+ calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
+ whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
+ want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
+ all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
+ following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
+ main():
+
+ import locale
+ locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
+
- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.