Degree symbol (UTF-8 > ASCII)

[Steven Taschuk]

Quoth Peter Clark:
> Steven Taschuk <staschuk at telusplanet.net> wrote in message news:<mailman.1050548247.26781.python-list at python.org>...
  [...]
> > So just do something like
> >     print >>fileobject, chr(176)
> >     print >>fileobject, u'\N{DEGREE SIGN}'.encode('latin-1')
> 
>     It worked fine when printing to a file (i.e., from the prompt),
> but I still got an error when I try to append it to a string destined
> to be included in a list:
> 
>     w += [u'\N{DEGREE SIGN}'.encode('latin-1') + scale.strip()]
> UnicodeError: ASCII decoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

And scale is a Unicode string, right?

    >>> '\xb0' + 'C'
    '\xb0C'
    >>> '\xb0' + u'C'
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
    UnicodeError: ASCII decoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

(For the same reason as before: concatenating a normal string and
a Unicode string results in a Unicode string, which means that the
normal string has to be decoded into a Unicode string first.)

I'd suggest doing all your string assembly with Unicode strings,
and only encoding to ISO-8859-1 at the output stage.  Mixing the
two kinds of strings is asking for trouble, as you have seen.

-- 
Steven Taschuk                                                 o- @
staschuk at telusplanet.net                                      7O   )
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