Python.org: Python 1.6 Released

"The final version of Python 1.6 is released on September 5, 2000...."

"There are lots of new modules and lots of bugs have been fixed...."

"Probably the most pervasive change is the addition of Unicode support. We've added a new fundamental datatype, the Unicode string, a new build-in function unicode(), an numerous C APIs to deal with Unicode and encodings. See the file Misc/unicode.txt for details, or http://starship.python.net/crew/lemburg/unicode-proposal.txt."

"Two other big changes, related to the Unicode support, are the addition of string methods and a new regular expression engine:

• String methods mean that you can now say s.lower() etc. instead of importing the string module and saying string.lower(s) etc. One peculiarity is that the equivalent of string.join(sequence, delimiter) is delimiter.join(sequence). Use " ".join(sequence) for the effect of string.join(sequence); to make this more readable, try space=" " first. Note that the maxsplit argument defaults in split() and replace() have changed from 0 to -1.
• The new regular expression engine, SRE by Fredrik Lundh, is fully backwards compatible with the old engine, and is in fact invoked using the same interface (the "re" module). You can explicitly invoke the old engine by import pre, or the SRE engine by importing sre. SRE is faster than pre, and supports Unicode (which was the main reason to put effort in yet another new regular expression engine -- this is at least the fourth!)."

Complete Story

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