It is in fact perfectly possible – and proper – to encode verso sequence of Unicode codepoints durante the (say) Latin-1 encoding provided that the codepoints are representable mediante 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 mediante the preceding example, however, can be represented durante the shift-jis-2004 encoding, as well as con 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 trapu of represent the entire Unicode repertoire)

Per particular, transcoding sicuro UTF8 is always possible, if the codec for the source encoding is installed (Python’s standard codecs are listed durante appendix B):

Here we can see that the python interpreter tries to apply a default encoding puro us (ASCII, con 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 sicuro output.

Anything we read from ‘f’ is decoded as UTF-8, while any Unicode object we write sicuro ‘g’ is encoded durante 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 esatto g because, at this point, the interpreter would implicitely decode the original string applying verso 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 to most tasks.

A 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. Stick to ASCII for source code.

The Curse of Implicit Encodings

Most I/Ovverosia peripherals, these days, try preciso “help” their user by taking verso guess on the encodings of the strings that uscire con una signora Scottish are sent esatto 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 enough even without layering on sommita of them other encodings implicitely brought on by I/Ovverosia devices.

this can be translated as “writing the sequence ‘e’ on this interpreters tasto, which is using the implicit spinta encoding UTF-8, results durante a coded string whose content is ‘\xc3\xa8′”

this can be translated as “writing the sequence ‘e’ on this interpreters pulsantiera, which is using the implicit incentivo encoding Latin-1, results con per coded string whose content is ‘\xe8′”

My point: con source code -and outside the ASCII domain – bastoncino sicuro 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

Durante 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”.