Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Dec 30)

[Max M]

michele.simionato at gmail.com wrote:

> uhm ... then there is a misprint in the discussion of the recipe;
> BTW what's the difference between .encode and .decode ?
> (yes, I have been living in happy ASCII-land until now ... ;)


# -*- coding: latin-1 -*-


# here i make a unicode string
unicode_file = u'Some danish characters æøå' #.encode('hex')
print type(unicode_file)
print repr(unicode_file)
print ''


# I can convert this unicode string to an ordinary string.
# because æøå are in the latin-1 charmap it can be understood as
# a latin-1 string
# the æøå characters even has the same value in both
latin1_file = unicode_file.encode('latin-1')
print type(latin1_file)
print repr(latin1_file)
print latin1_file
print ''


## I can *not* convert it to ascii
#ascii_file = unicode_file.encode('ascii')
#print ''


# I can also convert it to utf-8
utf8_file = unicode_file.encode('utf-8')
print type(utf8_file)
print repr(utf8_file)
print utf8_file
print ''


#utf8_file is now an ordinary string. again it can help to think of it 
as a file
#format.
#
#I can convert this file/string back to unicode again by using the 
decode method.
#It tells python to decode this "file format" as utf-8 when it loads it 
onto a
#unicode string. And we are back where we started


unicode_file = utf8_file.decode('utf-8')
print type(unicode_file)
print repr(unicode_file)
print ''


# So basically you can encode a unicode string into a special 
string/file format
# and you can decode a string from a special string/file format back 
into unicode.


###################################


<type 'unicode'>
u'Some danish characters \xe6\xf8\xe5'

<type 'str'>
'Some danish characters \xe6\xf8\xe5'
Some danish characters æøå

<type 'str'>
'Some danish characters \xc3\xa6\xc3\xb8\xc3\xa5'
Some danish characters æøå

<type 'unicode'>
u'Some danish characters \xe6\xf8\xe5'





-- 

hilsen/regards Max M, Denmark

http://www.mxm.dk/
IT's Mad Science