[Tutor] help: UnicodeError: ASCII decoding error: ordinal no t in range(1 28)

[D-Man]

On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 12:19:11PM -0400, Furmanek, Greg wrote:
| Ok I found the answer.
| 
| When I read the unicode I try to convert it to 
| ascii by:
| 
| ascii_string = u'\x81'.encode('ascii')

Are you sure it works?

Python 2.1 (#1, Apr 17 2001, 09:45:01)
[GCC 2.95.3-2 (cygwin special)] on cygwin_nt-4.01
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> u'\x81'.encode( 'ascii' )
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> '\x81'
'\x81'
>>> u'\x81'
u'\x81'
>>>


I don't know much about unicode, other than it is a different map from
binary <-> characters than ascii is.

My question(s) for you:  Do you really need to use unicode?  In the
above example you have a string literal.  In that case, why not use an
ascii string literal?  Alternatively can you convert the ascii strings
that you have to unicode?

>>> u'\x81' + "Hello"
u'\x81Hello'
>>> "Hello" + u'\x81'
u'Hello\x81'

I'm noticing that here the ascii string was automatically promoted to
a unicode string (kind of like int->float or int->long promotion).

-D