Marc-Andre's third try at this bulk patch seems to work (except that his copy of test_contains.py seems to be broken -- the lines he deleted were already absent). Checkin messages: New Unicode support for int(), float(), complex() and long(). - new APIs PyInt_FromUnicode() and PyLong_FromUnicode() - added support for Unicode to PyFloat_FromString() - new encoding API PyUnicode_EncodeDecimal() which converts Unicode to a decimal char* string (used in the above new APIs) - shortcuts for calls like int(<int object>) and float(<float obj>) - tests for all of the above Unicode compares and contains checks: - comparing Unicode and non-string types now works; TypeErrors are masked, all other errors such as ValueError during Unicode coercion are passed through (note that PyUnicode_Compare does not implement the masking -- PyObject_Compare does this) - contains now works for non-string types too; TypeErrors are masked and 0 returned; all other errors are passed through Better testing support for the standard codecs. Misc minor enhancements, such as an alias dbcs for the mbcs codec. Changes: - PyLong_FromString() now applies the same error checks as does PyInt_FromString(): trailing garbage is reported as error and not longer silently ignored. The only characters which may be trailing the digits are 'L' and 'l' -- these are still silently ignored. - string.ato?() now directly interface to int(), long() and float(). The error strings are now a little different, but the type still remains the same. These functions are now ready to get declared obsolete ;-) - PyNumber_Int() now also does a check for embedded NULL chars in the input string; PyNumber_Long() already did this (and still does) Followed by: Looks like I've gone a step too far there... (and test_contains.py seem to have a bug too). I've changed back to reporting all errors in PyUnicode_Contains() and added a few more test cases to test_contains.py (plus corrected the join() NameError).

--- a/Python/codecs.c	Wed Apr 05 18:25:12 2000 +0000
+++ b/Python/codecs.c	Wed Apr 05 20:11:21 2000 +0000
@@ -84,8 +84,11 @@
     return -1;
 }
 
+/* Convert a string to a normalized Python string: all characters are
+   converted to lower case, spaces are replaced with underscores. */
+
 static
-PyObject *lowercasestring(const char *string)
+PyObject *normalizestring(const char *string)
 {
     register int i;
     int len = strlen(string);
@@ -96,8 +99,14 @@
     if (v == NULL)
 	return NULL;
     p = PyString_AS_STRING(v);
-    for (i = 0; i < len; i++)
-	p[i] = tolower(string[i]);
+    for (i = 0; i < len; i++) {
+        register char ch = string[i];
+        if (ch == ' ')
+            ch = '-';
+        else
+            ch = tolower(ch);
+	p[i] = ch;
+    }
     return v;
 }
 
@@ -132,8 +141,10 @@
 	    goto onError;
     }
 
-    /* Convert the encoding to a lower-cased Python string */
-    v = lowercasestring(encoding);
+    /* Convert the encoding to a normalized Python string: all
+       characters are converted to lower case, spaces and hypens are
+       replaced with underscores. */
+    v = normalizestring(encoding);
     if (v == NULL)
 	goto onError;
     PyString_InternInPlace(&v);