Unicode universe (was Re: Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and links (Dec 30))

[Walter Dörwald]

Skip Montanaro wrote:
>     aahz> Here's the stark simple recipe: when you use Unicode, you *MUST*
>     aahz> switch to a Unicode-centric view of the universe.  Therefore you
>     aahz> encode *FROM* Unicode and you decode *TO* Unicode.  Period.  It's
>     aahz> similar to the way floating point contaminates ints.
> 
> That's what I do in my code.  Why do Unicode objects have a decode method
> then?

Because MAL implemented it! >;->

It first encodes in the default encoding and then decodes the result
with the specified encoding, so if u is a unicode object
    u.decode("utf-16")
is an abbreviation of
    u.encode().decode("utf-16")

In the same way str has an encode method, so
    s.encode("utf-16")
is an abbreviation of
    s.decode().encode("utf-16")

Bye,
    Walter Dörwald