[Tutor] Encoding

[Patrick Sabin]

> Mmm ok. So all strings in the app are unicode by default?
> 
Depends on your python version. If you use python 2.x, you have to use a 
u before the string:

s = u'Hallo World'

> Do you know if there is a function/method i can use to check encoding of 
> a string?

AFAIK such a function doesn't exist. Python3 solves this by using 
unicode strings by default.

> Patrick, ok. I should check if it's possible to save unicode strings in 
> the DB.

It is more an issue of your database adapter, than of your database.

> 
> Do you think i'd better set my db to utf8? I don't need latin1, it's 
> just the default value.

I think the encoding of the db doesn't matter much in this case, but I 
would prefer utf-8 over latin-1. If you get an utf-8 encoded raw byte 
string you call .decode('utf-8'). In case of an latin-1 encoded string 
you call .decode('latin1')

> Thankyou
> 
> Giorgio
- Patrick