[Tutor] unicode mapping doesn't work

[Lie Ryan]

Albert-Jan Roskam wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I want to substitute some letters with accents with theire non-accented 
> equivalents. It should be easy, but it doesn't work. What am I doing wrong?
> 
> trans = {}
> funnychars = u"éèêëóòôöáàâäÉÈÊËÓÒÔÖÁÀÂÄ"
> asciichars = "eeeeooooaaaaEEEEOOOOAAAA"
> for f, a in zip(funnychars, asciichars):
>     trans.update({f: a})
> print funnychars.translate(trans) # why doesn't this return the letters 
> without accents?
> 

Perhaps the doc should be more obvious and perhaps unicode.translate is 
badly designed, but:

translate(...)
     S.translate(table) -> unicode

     Return a copy of the string S, where all characters have been mapped
     through the given translation table, which must be a mapping of
     Unicode ordinals to Unicode ordinals, Unicode strings or None.
     Unmapped characters are left untouched. Characters mapped to None
     are deleted.


it says "mapping of Unicode ordinals to Unicode ordinals, Unicode 
strings or None"

which reads as a mapping of (int) to (int, unicode, or None).

your translation table is a mapping of (unicode) to (str).

this works:
for f, a in zip(funnychars, asciichars):
     trans.update({ord(f): unicode(a)})

this as well:
for f, a in zip(funnychars, asciichars):
     trans.update({ord(f): ord(a)})


btw, you're updating the dict and creates a new dict for each character 
then immediately disposing it. Why not just:
for f, a in zip(funnychars, asciichars):
     trans[ord(f)] = ord(a)