Hi all,
I'm getting pretty confused by a problem I'm trying to solve in python,
which is to detect lower-case characters in a string. This would
normally be a simple regex, but I have to also accept input strings with
umlats in them, such as 'ä'. I'm using python 2.7.6.
At first I thought this was a unicode problem, but now I'm not so sure.
About anything.
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
str = 'ä'
if isinstance(str, unicode):
print "This is unicode"
Running this tells me that string is *not* unicode. I know that there's
a thing called extended ASCII, and if I look up a table for that, I see
characters with accents and umlats:
http://www.asciitable.com/
This table suggests that 'ä' should correspond to an ordinal value of
132. But if I run:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
string = 'ä'
for c in string:
print ord(c)
I get:
195
164
which tells me that I'm dealing with a two-byte character, which brings
me back to this being unicode.
Now looking at which characters in the extended ASCII table correspond
to those values, I don't see any relation to 'ä'.
Finally, my understanding of python 2.x is that it does not support
unicode in regexes. Otherwise I'd just use \p{Ll} and have a good deal
more hair left on my head.
I've also tried forcing the string to ASCII using:
str.decode("ascii", "ignore")
and this is one of those characters that just gets dropped in the
conversion.
Any insights on what I'm missing would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Scott
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