It is in fact perfectly possible – and proper – onesto encode verso sequence of Unicode codepoints in the (say) Latin-1 encoding provided that the codepoints are representable con the target encoding. It is for instance possible preciso encode as ‘Latin-1’ the ‘U+00e8’ codepoint, whereas the same cannot be done for the Kanji codepoint ‘U+4e01’. Both codepoints durante the preceding Cultura colombiana che corteggia il matrimonio con appuntamenti example, however, can be represented per the shift-jis-2004 encoding, as well as in UTF8 or UTF16. UTF8 and UTF16 are special, because they are the only encodings that can always be safely specified as targets (as they are athletique of represent the entire Unicode repertoire)
Con particular, transcoding sicuro UTF8 is always possible, if the codec for the source encoding is installed (Python’s norma codecs are listed con appendix B):
Here we can see that the python interpreter tries to apply a default encoding preciso us (ASCII, sopra this case) and fails because us contains an accented character that is not part of the ASCII specs.
So the pythonic way of working with Unicode requires that we 1) decode strings coming from incentivo and 2) encode strings going sicuro output.
Anything we read from ‘f’ is decoded as UTF-8, while any Unicode object we write to ‘g’ is encoded per Latin-1. (So we may receive verso runtime error if ‘f’ contained korean text, for instance). One should also refrain from writing ordinary – encoded – strings preciso g because, at this point, the interpreter would implicitely decode the original string applying verso default codec (normally ASCII) which is probably not what one would expect, or desire.
It should be obvious that, for regular python programming – outside of multilingual text processing – Unicode objects are not normally used, as ordinary strings are perfectly suited sicuro most tasks.
A different kind of “Unicode support” is the interpreter capability of processing source files containing non-ASCII characters. This is doable, by inserting a directive like:
– (or other encoding) towards the beginning of the file. I advise against this, as per practice that will end up annoying you and your coworkers, as well as any other perspective user of the file. Stick to ASCII for source code.
The Curse of Implicit Encodings
Most I/O peripherals, these days, try preciso “help” their user by taking per guess on the encodings of the strings that are sent onesto them. This is good for normal use, atrocious if your aim is solving problems akin onesto those we have been tackling so far. Relationships between string types and encodings are confusing enough even without layering on apice of them other encodings implicitely brought on by I/Ovverosia devices.
this can be translated as “writing the sequence ‘e’ on this interpreters pulsantiera, which is using the implicit spinta encoding UTF-8, results per a coded string whose content is ‘\xc3\xa8′”
this can be translated as “writing the sequence ‘e’ on this interpreters tasto, which is using the implicit spinta encoding Latin-1, results mediante verso coded string whose content is ‘\xe8′”
My point: mediante source code -and outside the ASCII domain – stick preciso codepoint, even if writing literal characters may seem more convenient.
Unicode, encodings and HTML
Like XML, HTML had early awareness of multilingual environments. Too bad that the permissive attitude of prevalent browsers spoiled the fun for everybody.
Waht follows is my laundry list of multilingual HTML facts – check with the W? consortium if you need complete assessments.
Named entities
Per HTML, a (limited) number of national characters can be specified by using the so called ‘named entitites’: for instance the sequence “a” is displayed as “a”.
