It is con fact perfectly possible – and proper – to encode verso sequence of Unicode codepoints con the (say) Latin-1 encoding provided that the codepoints are representable in 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 in the preceding example, however, can be represented in the shift-jis-2004 encoding, as well as mediante 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)
Durante particular, transcoding onesto UTF8 is always possible, if the codec for the source encoding is installed (Python’s standard codecs are listed in appendix B):
Here we can see that the python interpreter tries puro apply verso 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 input and 2) encode strings going esatto output.
Anything we read from ‘f’ is decoded as UTF-8, while any Unicode object we write preciso ‘g’ is encoded per 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 preciso g because, at this point, the interpreter would implicitely decode the original string applying a 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 puro most tasks.
Verso 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 preciso ASCII for source code.
The Curse of Implicit Encodings
Most I/Ovvero peripherals, these days, try onesto «help» their user by taking a guess on the encodings of the strings that are sent sicuro them. This is good for normal use, atrocious if your aim is solving problems akin onesto those we have been tackling so far. Relationships between string types and encodings are confusing enough even without layering on sommita https://kissbrides.com/it/blog/siti-e-app-di-incontri-tailandesi/ of them other encodings implicitely brought on by I/O devices.
this can be translated as «writing the sequence ‘e’ on this interpreters tasto, which is using the implicit input encoding UTF-8, results per a coded string whose content is ‘\xc3\xa8′»
this can be translated as «writing the sequence ‘e’ on this interpreters tasto, which is using the implicit incentivo encoding Latin-1, results sopra verso coded string whose content is ‘\xe8′»
My point: per source code -and outside the ASCII domain – stick onesto 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
Sopra 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».