It is con fact perfectly possible – and proper – puro encode a sequence of Unicode codepoints sopra the (say) Latin-1 encoding provided that the codepoints are representable per the target encoding. It is for instance possible esatto encode as ‘Latin-1’ the ‘U+00e8’ codepoint, whereas the same cannot be done for the Kanji codepoint ‘U+4e01’. Both codepoints per the preceding example, however, can be represented sopra the shift-jis-2004 encoding, as well as in 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 capable of represent the entire Unicode repertoire)

Mediante particular, transcoding esatto UTF8 is always possible, if the codec for the source encoding is installed (Python’s norma codecs are listed sopra appendix B):

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

Anything we read from ‘f’ is decoded as UTF-8, while any Unicode object we write preciso ‘g’ is encoded in Latin-1. (So we may receive per runtime error if ‘f’ contained korean text, for instance). One should also refrain from writing ordinary – encoded – strings sicuro g because, at this point, the interpreter would implicitely decode the original string applying per 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 preciso most tasks.

Per 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 verso practice that will end up annoying you and your coworkers, as well as any other perspective user of the file. Stick puro ASCII for source code.

The Curse of Implicit Encodings

Most I/Oppure peripherals, these days, try preciso “help” their user by taking verso guess on the encodings of the strings that are sent puro them. This is good for normal use, atrocious if your aim is https://lovingwomen.org/it/blog/sposare-una-donna-ucraina/ solving problems akin puro those we have been tackling so far. Relationships between string types and encodings are confusing enough even without layering on apice of them other encodings implicitely brought on by I/O devices.

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

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

My point: sopra source code -and outside the ASCII domain – stick preciso 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, verso (limited) number of national characters can be specified by using the so called ‘named entitites’: for instance the sequence “a” is displayed as “a”.