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).

Python/codecs.c

@@ -84,8 +84,11 @@ int PyCodec_Register(PyObject *search_function)
     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 @@ PyObject *lowercasestring(const char *string)
     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 @@ PyObject *_PyCodec_Lookup(const char *encoding)
 	    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);