[Biopython-dev] Newick Parser

[Peter Cock]

On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 4:55 PM, Nigel Delaney
<nigel.delaney at outlook.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Does it even make sense to allow non-ASCII in Newick format?
>>
>
> I think that’s a matter of opinion.  The specs I found
> discussed how to parse the string, but not how to
> encode the string.

Right, and they probably all pre-date unicode and are implicitly ASCII only.

> The advantages I can see are allowing people to use the
> extended characters for node/tip label names, and being
> robust if different text-editors/programs muck with the files
> (which I would suspect are usually ASCII).

Yep.

> The disadvantage is that it’s another case to handle in code, so could just
> be ignored or throw an exception.
>
> Not sure what the preferred choice for biopython would be.

If you'd like to work on this it sounds useful - but you'll
have to be extra careful about testing under both Python 2
and Python 3 due to the joys of unicode.

Peter