[portland] Umlats from another dimension

[Scott Garman]

Hi all,

I'm getting pretty confused by a problem I'm trying to solve in python, 
which is to detect lower-case characters in a string. This would 
normally be a simple regex, but I have to also accept input strings with 
umlats in them, such as 'ä'. I'm using python 2.7.6.

At first I thought this was a unicode problem, but now I'm not so sure. 
About anything.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

str = 'ä'

if isinstance(str, unicode):
	print "This is unicode"

Running this tells me that string is *not* unicode. I know that there's 
a thing called extended ASCII, and if I look up a table for that, I see 
characters with accents and umlats:

http://www.asciitable.com/

This table suggests that 'ä' should correspond to an ordinal value of 
132. But if I run:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

string = 'ä'

for c in string:
     print ord(c)

I get:

195
164

which tells me that I'm dealing with a two-byte character, which brings 
me back to this being unicode.

Now looking at which characters in the extended ASCII table correspond 
to those values, I don't see any relation to 'ä'.

Finally, my understanding of python 2.x is that it does not support 
unicode in regexes. Otherwise I'd just use \p{Ll} and have a good deal 
more hair left on my head.

I've also tried forcing the string to ASCII using:

str.decode("ascii", "ignore")

and this is one of those characters that just gets dropped in the 
conversion.

Any insights on what I'm missing would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Scott