Comment by zahlman
5 days ago
There is no caching of a "utf-8 representation". You may check for example:
>>> x = '日本語'*100000000
>>> import time
>>> t = time.time(); y = x.encode(); time.time() - t # takes nontrivial time
>>> t = time.time(); y = x.encode(); time.time() - t # not cached; not any faster
Generally, the only reason this would happen implicitly is for I/O; actual operations on the string operate directly on the internal representation.
Python uses either 8, 16 or 32 bits per character according to the maximum code point found in the string; uint8 is thus used for all strings representable in Latin-1, not just "ASCII". (It does have other optimizations for ASCII strings.)
The reason for Windows being stuck with UTF-16 is quite easy to understand: backwards compatibility. Those APIs were introduced before there supplementary Unicode planes, such that "UTF-16" could be equated with UCS-2; then the surrogate-pair logic was bolted on top of that. Basically the same thing that happened in Java.
> There is no caching of a "utf-8 representation".
No there certainly is. This is documented in the official API documentation:
In particular, Python's Unicode object (PyUnicodeObject) contains a field named utf8. This field is populated when PyUnicode_AsUTF8AndSize() is first called and reused thereafter. You can check the exact code I'm talking about here:
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Objects/unicodeo...
Is it clear enough?
The C API may provide for it, but I'm not seeing a way to access that from Python. This sort of thing is provided for people writing C extensions who need to interface to other C code.
(And the code search seems to be broken; it can't find me the definition of `unicode_fill_utf8` although I'm sure it's obvious enough.)