[Tutor] character format

[Tony Meyer]

> You mean é? Oh, it is perfectly printable. It's even on my  
> keyboard (as unshifted 2), along with è, ç, à and ù. Ah, American  
> cultural assumption... ^^

>From the email address, chances are that this was a New Zealand cultural
assumption.  Ah, the French, lumping all English speakers under the American
banner <wink>.

Anyway, the explanation was right, if the label wasn't.  They are simply
hexidecimal representations of characters.

Denise: there are many uses for this - to know what you need to do, we need
to know what you are trying to do.  Where are you finding these characters?
Are they in a file?  If so, what type of file is it, and what do you want to
do with the file?  Those questions are more likely to lead you to the module
you're after.

I believe Max's guess was that the file is compressed with bzip (the first
two characters will be BZ, as you found).  Try doing:

>>> import bz2
>>> print bz2.decompress(data)

Where data is a string containing the characters you have.  (Although you
say that compression is unlikely, the BZ characters would be a big
co-incidence).

=Tony.Meyer