It is con fact perfectly possible – and proper – puro encode a sequence of Unicode codepoints durante the (say) Latin-1 encoding provided that the codepoints are representable mediante the target encoding. It is for instance possible onesto encode as ‘Latin-1’ the ‘U+00e8’ codepoint, whereas the same cannot be done for the Kanji codepoint ‘U+4e01’. Both codepoints in the preceding example, however, can be represented con 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 court of represent the entire Unicode repertoire)
Mediante particular, transcoding sicuro UTF8 is always possible, if the codec for the source encoding is installed (Python’s canone codecs are listed con appendix B):
Here we can see that the python interpreter tries onesto apply a default encoding to us (ASCII, in 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 esatto output.
Anything we read from ‘f’ is decoded as UTF-8, while any Unicode object we write onesto ‘g’ is encoded mediante Latin-1. (So we may receive per 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 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 to 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 a 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 onesto ASCII for source code.
The Curse of Implicit Encodings
Most I/Oppure peripherals, these days, try puro “help” their user by taking verso guess on the encodings of the strings that are sent preciso them. This is good for normal use, atrocious if your aim is solving problems akin to those we have been tackling so far. Relationships between string types and encodings are confusing single russi caldi enough even without layering on culmine of them other encodings implicitely brought on by I/Ovvero devices.
this can be translated as “writing the sequence ‘e’ on this interpreters tastiera, which is using the implicit molla encoding UTF-8, results in per 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 input encoding Latin-1, results in a coded string whose content is ‘\xe8′”
My point: durante source code -and outside the ASCII domain – stick onesto 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, 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”.
