[Tutor] Fwd: Available characters

[Citizen Kant]

Thanks!

There are only 127 ASCII characters, so getting a list of them is trivial:

ascii = map(chr, range(128))  # Python 2
ascii = list(map(chr, range(128)))  # Python 3


or if you prefer a string:

ascii = ''.join(map(chr, range(128)))


If you don't like map(), you can use a list comprehension:

[chr(i) for i in range(128)]

The string module already defines some useful subsets of them:

py> import string
py> string.printable
'**0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrst**uvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWX**
YZ!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^**_`{|}~ \t\n\r\x0b\x0c'


There are 1114111 (hexadecimal 0x10FFFF) possible Unicode code-points, but
most of them are currently unassigned. Of those that are assigned, many of
them are reserved as non-characters or for special purposes, and even those
which are assigned, most fonts do not display anything even close to the
full range of Unicode characters.

If you spend some time on the Unicode web site, you will find lists of
characters which are defined:

www.unicode.org

but beware, it is relatively heavy going. Wikipedia has a page showing all
currently assigned characters, but font support is still lousy and many of
them display as boxes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**List_of_Unicode_characters<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters>

You can generate the entire list yourself, using the same technique as for
ASCII above:


# Python 2:
unicode = ''.join(map(unichr, xrange(1114112)))

# Python3:
unicode = ''.join(map(chr, range(1114112)))


although it will take a few seconds to generate the entire range. You can
then get the name for each one using something like this:

import unicodedata
for c in unicode:
    try:
        print(c, unicodedata.name(c))
    except ValueError:
        # unassigned, or a reserved non-character
        pass


but remember that there are currently almost 100,000 defined characters in
Unicode, and your terminal will probably not be able to print most of them.
Expect to see a lot of boxes
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