It is mediante fact perfectly possible – and proper – to encode a sequence of Unicode codepoints per the (say) Latin-1 encoding provided that the codepoints are representable con the target encoding. It is for instance possible to 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 durante 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)
Sopra particular, transcoding to UTF8 is always possible, if the codec for the source encoding is installed (Python’s norma codecs are listed durante appendix B):
Here we can see that the python interpreter tries to apply per default encoding puro us (ASCII, mediante 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 spinta and 2) encode strings going onesto output.
Anything we read from ‘f’ is decoded as UTF-8, while any Unicode object we write onesto ‘g’ is encoded in 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 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 sicuro 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 verso 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/O peripherals, these days, try esatto “help” their user by taking a guess on the encodings of the strings that are sent sicuro them. This is good for normal use, atrocious if your aim is solving problems akin esatto those we have been tackling so far. Relationships between string types and encodings are confusing Asia donne in cerca di un uomo enough even without layering on primo posto of them other encodings implicitely brought on by I/Oppure devices.
this can be translated as “writing the sequence ‘e’ on this interpreters console, which is using the implicit incentivo encoding UTF-8, results in 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 molla encoding Latin-1, results sopra a coded string whose content is ‘\xe8′”
My point: mediante source code -and outside the ASCII domain – stick 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
Sopra HTML, per (limited) number of national characters can be specified by using the so called ‘named entitites’: for instance the sequence “a” is displayed as “a”.