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On 09-03-2010 18:36, Robert Kern wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:hn60vg$5pi$1@dough.gmane.org" type="cite">On
2010-03-09 11:12 AM, Stef Mientki wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">On 09-03-2010 18:02, Alf P. Steinbach wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">* C. Benson Manica:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Hours of Googling has not helped me
resolve a seemingly simple
<br>
question - Given a string s, how can I tell whether it's ascii (and
<br>
thus 1 byte per character) or UTF-8 (and two bytes per character)?
<br>
This is python 2.4.3, so I don't have getsizeof available to me.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Generally, if you need 100% certainty then you can't tell the encoding
<br>
from a sequence of byte values.
<br>
<br>
However, if you know that it's EITHER ascii or utf-8 then the presence
<br>
of any value above 127 (or, for signed byte values, any negative
<br>
values), tells you that it can't be ascii,
<br>
</blockquote>
AFAIK it's completely impossible.
<br>
UTF-8 characters have 1 to 4 bytes / byte.
<br>
I can create ASCII strings containing byte values between 127 and 255.
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
No, you can't. ASCII strings only have characters in the range 0..127.
You could create Latin-1 (or any number of the 8-bit encodings out
there) strings with characters 0..255, yes, but not ASCII.
<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<font size="+1">Probably, and according to wikipedia you're right.<br>
I think I've to get rid of my old books, <br>
Borland turbo Pascal 4 (1987) has an ASCII table of 256 characters,<br>
while the small letters say 7-bit ;-)<br>
<br>
cheers,<br>
Stef<br>
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