Python unicode windows-1252

Unicode characters have no representation in bytes; this is what character encoding does - a mapping from Unicode characters to bytes. Each encoding handles the mapping differently, and not all encodings supports all Unicode characters, possibly resulting in issues when converting from one encoding to the other.

Only the UTF family supports all Unicode characters. The most commonly used encoding is UTF-8 , so stick with that whenever possible. With str. The default signature is str. A nice alternative is to normalise the data first with unicodedata. The unicode standard defines some characters as composed from multiple other characters.

Not all character information websites show this information, but e. In Unicode, characters are mapped to so-called code points. Composition is the process of combining multiple characters to form a single character, typically a base character and one or more marks 4. Decomposition is the reverse; splitting a composed character into multiple characters. Before diving into normalisation, let's define a function for printing the Unicode code points for each character in a string:.

Last Updated: February 25, Recode Windows characters as UTF-8 ruby. Written by Marcello Barnaba. Related protips. Take a photo of yourself every time you commit Have a fresh tip? A person reading that can deduce that it was actually supposed to say this:. A modern computer has the ability to display text that uses over , different characters, but unfortunately that text sometimes passes through a doddering old program that believes there are only the that it can fit in a single byte.

But the problem is that sometimes you might have to deal with text that comes out of other code. We deal with this a lot at Luminoso , where the text our customers want us to analyze has often passed through several different pieces of software, each with their own quirks, probably with Microsoft Office somewhere in the chain.

It detects some of the most common encoding mistakes and does what it can to undo them. Skipping a bunch of edge cases and error handling, it looked something like this:. Because encoded text can actually be ambiguous, we have to figure out whether the text is better when we fix it or when we leave it alone. The venerable Mark Pilgrim has a key insight when discussing his chardet module:.

The unicodedata module can tell us lots of things we want to know about any given character:. Now we can write a more complicated but much more principled Unicode fixer by following some rules of thumb:.

That leads us to a complete Unicode fixer that applies these rules. The code we arrive at appears below. But as I edit this post six years later, I should remind you that this was !