It is per fact perfectly possible – and proper – esatto encode a sequence of Unicode codepoints con the (say) Latin-1 encoding provided that the codepoints are representable durante the target encoding. It is for sul sito web instance possible puro encode as ‘Latin-1’ the ‘U+00e8’ codepoint, whereas the same cannot be done for the Kanji codepoint ‘U+4e01’. Both codepoints per the preceding example, however, can be represented durante the shift-jis-2004 encoding, as well as sopra 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 trapu of represent the entire Unicode repertoire)
Per particular, transcoding onesto UTF8 is always possible, if the codec for the source encoding is installed (Python’s standard codecs are listed per appendix B):
Here we can see that the python interpreter tries sicuro apply a default encoding puro us (ASCII, per 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 stimolo and 2) encode strings going puro output.
Anything we read from ‘f’ is decoded as UTF-8, while any Unicode object we write to ‘g’ is encoded mediante Latin-1. (So we may receive a runtime error if ‘f’ contained korean text, for instance). One should also refrain from writing ordinary – encoded – strings esatto g because, at this point, the interpreter would implicitely decode the original string applying per 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 esatto most tasks.
Per different kind of “Unicode support” is the interpreter capability of processing source files containing non-ASCII characters. This is doable, by inserting per directive like:
– (or other encoding) towards the beginning of the file. I advise against this, as a practice that will end up annoying you and your coworkers, as well as any other perspective user of the file. Bastoncino puro ASCII for source code.
The Curse of Implicit Encodings
Most I/Ovvero peripherals, these days, try sicuro “help” their user by taking verso 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 sicuro those we have been tackling so far. Relationships between string types and encodings are confusing enough even without layering on vertice of them other encodings implicitely brought on by I/Oppure devices.
this can be translated as “writing the sequence ‘e’ on this interpreters tasto, which is using the implicit stimolo encoding UTF-8, results sopra per coded string whose content is ‘\xc3\xa8′”
this can be translated as “writing the sequence ‘e’ on this interpreters tastiera, which is using the implicit molla encoding Latin-1, results durante a coded string whose content is ‘\xe8′”
My point: per source code -and outside the ASCII domain – bastoncino to 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
In HTML, verso (limited) number of national characters can be specified by using the so called ‘named entitites’: for instance the sequence “a” is displayed as “a”.