[Tutor] Encoding

[Giorgio]

Thankyou.

You have clarificated many things in those emails. Due to high numbers of
messages i won't quote everything.

So, as i can clearly understand reading last spir's post, python gets
strings encoded by my editor and to convert them to unicode i need to
specify HOW they're encoded. This makes clear this example:

c = "giorgio è giorgio"
d = c.decode("utf8")

I create an utf8 string, and to convert it into unicode i need to tell
python that the string IS utf8.

Just don't understand why in my Windows XP computer in Python IDLE doesn't
work:

>>> ================================ RESTART
================================
>>>
>>> c = "giorgio è giorgio"
>>> c
'giorgio \xe8 giorgio'
>>> d = c.decode("utf8")

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#10>", line 1, in <module>
    d = c.decode("utf8")
  File "C:\Python26\lib\encodings\utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
    return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position 8-10:
invalid data
>>>

In IDLE options i've set encoding to UTF8 of course. I also have some linux
servers where i can try the IDLE but Putty doesn't seem to support UTF8.

But, let's continue:

In that example i've specified UTF8 in the decode method. If i hadn't set it
python would have taken the one i specified in the second line of the file,
right?

As last point, i can't understand why this works:

>>> a = u"giorgio è giorgio"
>>> a
u'giorgio \xe8 giorgio'

And this one doesn't:

>>> a = "giorgio è giorgio"
>>> b = unicode(a)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#14>", line 1, in <module>
    b = unicode(a)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe8 in position 8:
ordinal not in range(128)
>>>

The second doesn't work because i have not told python how the string was
encoded. But in the first too i haven't specified the encoding O_O.

Thankyou again for your help.

Giorgio
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