"Giorgio" <anothernetfel...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:23ce85921003050915p1a084c0co73d973282d8fb...@mail.gmail.com...
2010/3/5 Dave Angel <da...@ieee.org>
I think the problem is that i can't find any difference between 2 lines
quoted above:
a = u"ciao è ciao"
and
a = "ciao è ciao"
a = unicode(a)
Maybe this will help:
# coding: utf-8
a = "ciao è ciao"
b = u"ciao è ciao".encode('latin-1')
a is a UTF-8 string, due to #coding line in source.
b is a latin-1 string, due to explicit encoding.
a = unicode(a)
b = unicode(b)
Now what will happen? unicode() uses 'ascii' if not specified, because it
has no idea of the encoding of a or b. Only the programmer knows. It does
not use the #coding line to decide.
#coding is *only* used to specify the encoding the source file is saved in,
so when Python executes the script, reads the source and parses a literal
Unicode string (u'...', u"...", etc.) the bytes read from the file are
decoded using the #coding specified.
If Python parses a byte string ('...', "...", etc.) the bytes read from the
file are stored directly in the string. The coding line isn't even used.
The bytes will be exactly what was saved in the file between the quotes.
-Mark
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