trying to understand unicode

[John Machin]

On 20 Apr 2005 10:58:35 GMT, "F. Petitjean"
<littlejohn.75 at news.free.fr> wrote:

>Python has a very good support of unicode, utf8, encodings ... But I
>have some difficulties with the concepts and the vocabulary.

You're not alone there. But I don't expect the docs for the Python
implementation of Unicode to explain the concepts and vocabulary of
Unicode. That's the job of the Unicode consortium, and they do a
not-unreasonable job of it; see www.unicode.org and in particular 

http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UCD.html

explains all the things that the Python unicodedata module is
implementing.


> The
>documentation is not bad, but for example in reading
>http://docs.python.org/lib/module-unicodedata.html
>I had a long time to figure out what unicodedata.digit(unichr) would
>mean, a simple example is badly lacking.
>
>So I wrote the following script :
>
[snip]
>

>I think that such code snippets should be included in the documentation
>or in a Wiki.
>

Any effort should be directed (IMESHO) towards (a) keeping the URL in
the Python documentation up-to-date [it's not] (b) using the *LATEST*
version of the ucd file when each version of Python is released [still
stuck on 3.2.0 when the current version available from Unicode.org is
4.1.0]
    
[Exit, pursued by a bear.]
[Noises off.]

OK OK don't hit me, Martin, how about instructions on how to DIY,
then?

Cheers,
John