Test for a unicode string

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> I have a regular expression test in a script. When a unicode character
> get tested in the regex it gives an error:
> 
> UnicodeError: ASCII decoding error: ordinal not in range(128)
> 
> Question: Is there a way to test a string for unicode chars (ie. test
> if a string will throw the error cited above).
> 
> Like:
>  if  unicode string:
>       print  'string's line #'
>  else:
>       process the string

Sure:

try:
    s.decode("ascii")
except UnicodeError:
    print 'string's line #'
else:
    process the string

Notice that you get a *decoding* error, so you are not testing
Unicode characters, but byte strings.

HTH,
Martin