[Tutor] Printing Chinese characters?

[Alfred Milgrom]

Hi:

Let me start by saying I just love programming in Python. I love its 
philosophy, its ease of use, the obvious productivity, the third-party 
support, the code libraries, and so on.
(As an aside, I thought list comprehension was pretty great, but now that I 
have discovered iterators, it's even better:)

But just as important as the power of the language, the support given by 
people on this forum is incredible. So I just want to start off by saying 
thanks to all of you.

As far as my Chinese text string is concerned, the string is part of 
comments in a Go game problem from a Chinese web site (Go is an ancient 
oriental board game, also known as weiqi in China and baduk in Korea).

My first problem was converting the string into unicode. Now that I have 
access to the CJK encodings (thanks Danny), I believe that the coding is 
mainly 'chinese' rather than 'big5'. But there could be some special 
Japanese Go terms in there as well :((

The first two Chinese characters might be:
u'\u9ed1' Black
u'\u5408' combine

(Translation made using unihan.txt - thanks Neal for pointing me in that 
direction)
This makes sense in the context of the problem and would translate as 
'Black to join his groups' (or similar).

I haven't figured out what to do with the '?' characters, and haven't 
decided if they are punctuation of some kind or an escape character or 
whatever.  And I don't know when to check for Japanese characters, either. 
So I am not sure about the following characters yet. Some characters are 
definitely not 'chinese' encoding.

But now I have enough ammunition to get me going forward.
(Terry: When I get enough confidence in my decoding, I will get in touch 
with you concerning your unihan Python lookup module. Thanks.)

As a final aside, I know that many people prefer other editors rather than 
IDLE, but IDLE can't be beaten in this situation. There is no need for 
other GUIs, web browsers, etc. Because IDLE is written in Tkinter, it 
automatically displays unicode characters properly!

Thanks again,
Fred Milgrom