Converting Unicode to Local Strings
The Python language provides a simple encode(encoding) method to convert unicode strings to a local string for easier processing. The encoding method takes only encoding such as utf-8, utf-16, iso-8859-1, and ascii as its single argument and returns a string encoded in that format. Strings can be converted to unicode by several different methods. One is to define the string as unicode by prefixing it with a u when assigning it to a variable. Another is to combine a unicode string with another string. The resulting string will be unicode. You can also use the decode(encoding) method to decode the string. The decode method returns a unicode form of the string. Note The ASCII encoding allows only for characters up to 128. If your string includes characters that are above that range, you will need to translate those characters before encoding the string to ASCII. import string locStr = "El " uniStr = u"Ni\u00F1o" print uniStr.encode('utf-8') print uniStr.encode('utf-16') print uniStr.encode('iso-8859-1') #Combine local and unicode results #in new unicode string newStr = locStr+uniStr print newStr.encode('iso-8859-1') #ascii will error because character '\xF1' #is out of range asciiStr = newStr.encode('iso-8859-1') asciiStr =asciiStr.translate(\ string.maketrans('\xF1','n'), '') print asciiStr.encode('ascii') print newStr.encode('ascii')unicode_str.py Niño ÿ Output from unicode_str.py code |
N|I|ñ|o Niño El Niño El Nino Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\books\python\CH2\code\unicode_str.py", line 19, in ? print newStr.encode('ascii') UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf1' in position 5: ordinal not in range(128)