Join strings - very simple Q.

[Duncan Booth]

"Diez B. Roggisch" <deets at nospam.web.de> wrote:

> 7stud schrieb:
>> When I try the latter example, I get an error:
>> 
>> lst = ["hello", "world"]
>> print unicode.join(u"\u00d7", lst)
>> 
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>   File "test1.py", line 2, in ?
>>     print unicode.join(u"\u00d7", lst)
>> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xd7' in
>> position 5: ordinal not in range(128)
> 
> You are mixing unicode with bytestrings here. make "hello" u"hello", 
> same for "world".
> 
Sorry Diez, wrong answer. A unicode separator will cause all the strings 
being joined to be decoded using the default encoding (which could cause 
problems with non-ascii characters in the decoded strings), but the problem 
here is with encoding, not decoding.

7stud: the problem isn't the join, it is printing the string on your 
terminal which is the problem. Try just:

   print u"\u00d7"

and you'll get the same problem. Or:

 lst = ["hello", "world"]
 joined = unicode.join(u"\u00d7", lst)

will work, but you'll still have problems printing the result.

If you try it using a Python interpreter with an appropriate output 
encoding it will work (idle can handle it on my system, but the DOS prompt 
with its default codepage cannot).