Message2785

Charlie,

No, I don't think that patching datetime is the right thing to do, for reasons both general and specific. The general reason is that every time we have to patch the Python stdlib, this represents an incompatibility between CPython and Jython, and as far as I understand, it's better to be as compatible as possible. 

The specific reason is that some codecs do indeed convert byte strings to byte strings and back. http://www.python.org/doc/2.3.5/lib/node130.html says:
"A number of codecs are specific to Python, so their codec names have no meaning outside Python. Some of them don't convert from Unicode strings to byte strings, but instead use the property of the Python codecs machinery that any bijective function with one argument can be considered as an encoding."

string-escape, which is at issue here, is one such codec.