On Oct 17, 2:38 pm, Joe Strout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Thanks for the answers. That clears things up quite a bit. > > >> What if your source file is set to utf-8? Do you then have a proper > >> UTF-8 string, but the problem is that none of the standard Python > >> library methods know how to properly interpret UTF-8? > > > Well, the decode method knows how to decode that bytes into a > > `unicode` > > object if you call it with 'utf-8' as argument. > > OK, good to know. > > >> 4. In Python 3.0, this silliness goes away, because all strings are > >> Unicode by default. > > > Yes and no. The problem just shifts because at some point you get > > into > > similar troubles, just in the other direction. Data enters the > > program > > as bytes and must leave it as bytes again, so you have to deal with > > encodings at those points. > > Yes, but that's still much better than having to litter your code with > 'u' prefixes and .decode calls and so on. If I'm using a UTF-8-savvy > text editor (as we all should be doing in the 21st century!), and type > "foo = '2π'", I should get a string containing a '2' and a pi > character, and all the text operations (like counting characters, > etc.) should Just Work. > > When I read and write files or sockets or whatever, of course I'll > have to think about what encoding the text should be... but internal > to my own source code, I shouldn't have to. > > I understand the need for a transition strategy, which is what we have > in 2.x, and that's working well enough. But I'll be glad when it's > over. :) > > Cheers, > - Joe
Thanks for the answers. The following factors should be considerd when dealing with unicode characters in python: 1. Declaring # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- at the top of script 2. Opening files with appropriate encoding: txt = codecs.open (filename, 'w+', encoding='utf-8') My program works fine now. There is no specific way of adding unicode characters in list or dictionaies. The character itself has to be in unicode. Cheers, Gita -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
