Out of curiosity, why do you prefer decimal values to refer to Unicode code points? Most references, http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0400.pdf (official) or https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Unicode/Character_reference/0000-0FFF , prefer to refer to them by hexadecimal as the planes and ranges are broken up by hex values. On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 5:52 PM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas@gmail.com> wrote:
In past discussion about inputing and printing characters, I was proposing decimal notation instead of hex. Since the discussion was lost in off-topic talks, I'll try to summarise my idea better.
I use ASCII only for code input (there are good reasons for that). Here I'll use Python 3.6, and Windows 7, so I can use print() with unicode directly and it works now in system console.
Suppose I only start programming and want to do some character manipulation. The vey first thing I would probably start with is a simple output for latin and cyrillic capital letters:
caps_lat = "" for o in range(65, 91): caps_lat = caps_lat + chr(o) print (caps_lat)
caps_cyr = "" for o in range(1040, 1072): caps_cyr = caps_cyr + chr(o) print (caps_cyr)
Which prints: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ АБВГДЕЖЗИЙКЛМНОПРСТУФХЦЧШЩЪЫЬЭЮЯ
Say, I want now to input something direct in code:
s = "first cyrillic letters: " + chr(1040) + chr(1041) + chr(1042)
Which works fine and has clean look. However it is not very convinient because of much typing and also, if I generate such strings, adds a bit more complexity. But in general it is fine, and I use this method currently.
========= Proposal: I would want to have a possibility to input it *by decimals*:
s = "first cyrillic letters: \{1040}\{1041}\{1042}" or: s = "first cyrillic letters: \(1040)\(1041)\(1042)"
=========
This is more compact and seems not very contradictive with current Python escape characters in string literals. So backslash is a start of some escaping in most cases.
For me most important is that in such way I would avoid any presence of hex numbers in strings, which I find very good for readability and for me it is very convinient since I use decimals for processing everywhere (and encourage everyone to do so).
So this is my proposal, any comments on this are appreciated.
PS:
Currently Python 3 supports these in addition to \x: (from https://docs.python.org/3/howto/unicode.html) """ If you can’t enter a particular character in your editor or want to keep the source code ASCII-only for some reason, you can also use escape sequences in string literals.
"\N{GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA}" # Using the character name "\u0394" # Using a 16-bit hex value "\U00000394" # Using a 32-bit hex value
""" So I have many possibilities and all of them strangely contradicts with my image of intuitive and readable. Well, using charater name is readable, but seriously not much of a practical solution for input, but could be very useful for printing description of a character.
Mikhail _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/