Skip Montanaro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> michele> BTW what's the difference between .encode and .decode ?
>
> I started to answer, then got confused when I read the docstrings for
> unicode.encode and unicode.decode:
>
> >>> help(u"\xe4".decode)
> Help on built-in function decode:
>
> decode(...)
> S.decode([encoding[,errors]]) -> string or unicode
>
> Decodes S using the codec registered for encoding. encoding defaults
> to the default encoding. errors may be given to set a different error
> handling scheme. Default is 'strict' meaning that encoding errors
> raise
> a UnicodeDecodeError. Other possible values are 'ignore' and 'replace'
> as well as any other name registerd with codecs.register_error that is
> able to handle UnicodeDecodeErrors.
>
> >>> help(u"\xe4".encode)
> Help on built-in function encode:
>
> encode(...)
> S.encode([encoding[,errors]]) -> string or unicode
>
> Encodes S using the codec registered for encoding. encoding defaults
> to the default encoding. errors may be given to set a different error
> handling scheme. Default is 'strict' meaning that encoding errors
> raise
> a UnicodeEncodeError. Other possible values are 'ignore', 'replace'
> and
> 'xmlcharrefreplace' as well as any other name registered with
> codecs.register_error that can handle UnicodeEncodeErrors.
>
> It probably makes sense to one who knows, but for the feeble-minded like
> myself, they seem about the same.
It seems also the error messages aren't too helpful:
>>> "�".encode("latin-1")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x84 in position 0: ordinal
not in range(128)
>>>
Hm, why does the 'encode' call complain about decoding?
Why do string objects have an encode method, and why do unicode objects
have a decode method, and what does this error message want to tell me:
>>> u"�".decode("latin-1")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe4' in position 0:
ordinal not in range(128)
>>>
Thomas
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