Python will check the first or second line for an emacs/vim-like encoding specification.
More precisely, the first or second line must match the regular expression "coding[:=]\s*([-\w.]+)". The first group of this expression is then interpreted as encoding name. If the encoding is unknown to Python, an error is raised during compilation.
Source: PEP 263
(A BOM would also make Python interpret the source as UTF-8.
I would recommend, you use this over .decode('utf8')
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
special_char_string = u"äöüáèô"
In any case, special_char_string will then contain a unicode object, no longer a str.
As you can see, they're both semantically equivalent:
>>> u"äöüáèô" == "äöüáèô".decode('utf8')
True
And the reverse:
>>> u"äöüáèô".encode('utf8')
'\xc3\xa4\xc3\xb6\xc3\xbc\xc3\xa1\xc3\xa8\xc3\xb4'
>>> "äöüáèô"
'\xc3\xa4\xc3\xb6\xc3\xbc\xc3\xa1\xc3\xa8\xc3\xb4'
There is a technical difference, however: if you use u"something", it will instruct the parser that there is a unicode literal, it should be a bit faster.
Answer from phant0m on Stack OverflowPython will check the first or second line for an emacs/vim-like encoding specification.
More precisely, the first or second line must match the regular expression "coding[:=]\s*([-\w.]+)". The first group of this expression is then interpreted as encoding name. If the encoding is unknown to Python, an error is raised during compilation.
Source: PEP 263
(A BOM would also make Python interpret the source as UTF-8.
I would recommend, you use this over .decode('utf8')
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
special_char_string = u"äöüáèô"
In any case, special_char_string will then contain a unicode object, no longer a str.
As you can see, they're both semantically equivalent:
>>> u"äöüáèô" == "äöüáèô".decode('utf8')
True
And the reverse:
>>> u"äöüáèô".encode('utf8')
'\xc3\xa4\xc3\xb6\xc3\xbc\xc3\xa1\xc3\xa8\xc3\xb4'
>>> "äöüáèô"
'\xc3\xa4\xc3\xb6\xc3\xbc\xc3\xa1\xc3\xa8\xc3\xb4'
There is a technical difference, however: if you use u"something", it will instruct the parser that there is a unicode literal, it should be a bit faster.
Yes, this is the recommended way for Python 2.x, see PEP 0263. In Python 3.x and above, the default encoding is UTF-8 and not ASCII, so you don't need this there. See PEP 3120.
You can fix the backslash by escaping it and ' can be fixed by putting it in double quotes:
symbols = {..., '\\', ... "'", ...}
But typing all this out is pretty tedious. Why not just use string.punctuation instead:
>>> from string import punctuation
>>> set(punctuation)
{'~', ':', "'", '+', '[', '\\', '@', '^', '{', '%', '(', '-', '"', '*', '|', ',', '&', '<', '`', '}', '.', '_', '=', ']', '!', '>', ';', '?', '#', '$', ')', '/'}
>>>
user2555451's answer is spot on, but just as an observation on how to get these into Python efficiently - the first part of your question - try this:
symbols = set(r"""`~!@#$%^&*()_-+={[}}|\:;"'<,>.?/""")
That:
- Wraps the string in three quotes to simplify handling the single or double quote issue
- Puts an
rin front of the string to handle the escape character setconverts the string to a set
The initial string was missing the close square bracket, just as an aside. Using a simple set operator:
>>> symbols - set(string.punctuation)
{']'}
Prevention is better than cure. What you need is to find out how that rubbish is being created. Please edit your question to show the code that creates it, and then we can help you fix it. It looks like somebody has done:
your_unicode_string = original_utf8_encoded_bytestring.decode('latin1')
The cure is to reverse the process, simply, and then decode.
correct_unicode_string = your_unicode_string.encode('latin1').decode('utf8')
Update Based on the code that you supplied, the probable cause is that the website declares that it is encoded in ISO-8859-1 (aka latin1) but in reality it is encoded in UTF-8. Please update your question to show us the url.
If you can't show it, read the BS docs; it looks like you'll need to use:
BeautifulSoup(web, from_encoding='utf8')
Unicode support in many languages is confusing, so your error here is understandable. Those strings are UTF-8 bytes, which would work properly if you drop the u at the front:
>>> err = u'\xc3\x96berg'
>>> print err
Ã?berg
>>> x = '\xc3\x96berg'
>>> print x
Öberg
>>> u = x.decode('utf-8')
>>> u
u'\xd6berg'
>>> print u
Öberg
For lots more information:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
http://docs.python.org/howto/unicode.html
You should really really read those links and understand what is going on before proceeding. If, however, you absolutely need to have something that works today, you can use this horrible hack that I am embarrassed to post publicly:
def convert_fake_unicode_to_real_unicode(string):
return ''.join(map(chr, map(ord, string))).decode('utf-8')