Can I turn off implicit Python unicode conversions to find my mixed-strings bugs?

Question

When profiling our code I was surprised to find millions of calls to
C:\\Python26\\lib\\encodings\\utf_8.py:15(decode)

I started debugging and found that across

Answer 1

The following should work:

>>> import sys
>>> reload(sys)
<module 'sys' (built-in)>
>>> sys.setdefaultencoding('undefined')
>>> u"abc" + u"xyz"
u'abcxyz'
>>> u"abc" + "xyz"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/encodings/undefined.py", line 22, in decode
    raise UnicodeError("undefined encoding")
UnicodeError: undefined encoding

reload(sys) in the snippet above is only necessary here since normally sys.setdefaultencoding is supposed to go in a sitecustomize.py file in your Python site-packages directory (it's advisable to do that).