[Pythonmac-SIG] Newbie: Unicode in Python 2.3?

[Bob Ippolito]

On Mar 20, 2004, at 12:56 PM, Philippe de Rochambeau wrote:

> I am trying to use Unicode with the Macosx 10.3 built-in Python 2.3 
> interpreter. However, I keep getting messages telling me that the 
> character value is not within the right range (128)
>
> >>> import codecs
> >>> alef = unichr(1488)
> >>> print alef
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u5d0' in 
> position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
> >>>
>
> How can you find out if a particular version of Python supports 
> Unicode or not?

It supports unicode just fine, it just doesn't know your terminal does. 
  Terminal.app is UTF-8 by default.  Try this:

Python 2.3 (#1, Sep 13 2003, 00:49:11)
[GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1495)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> import sys, codecs
 >>> sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf8')(sys.stdout)
 >>> print unichr(1488)
א

If you want to type UTF-8 into the terminal, you would use something 
similar with getreader and sys.stdin.

-bob