problem with unicode

[John Machin]

On Apr 25, 9:15 pm, "andreas.prof... at googlemail.com"
<andreas.prof... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I'm using the win32 console and have the following short program
> excerpt
>
> # media is a binary string (mysql escaped zipped file)
>
> >> print media
>
> xワユロ[ヨ ...
> (works)
>
> >> print unicode(media)
>
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x9c in position
> 1: ordinal not in range(128)
> (ok i guess print assumes you want to print to ascii)

Guessing is no substitute for reading the manual.

print has nothing to do with your problem; the problem is
unicode(media) -- as you specified no encoding, it uses the default
encoding, which is ascii [unless you have been mucking about, which is
not recommended]. As the 2nd byte is 0x9c, ascii is going nowhere.


>
> >> print unicode(media).encode('utf-8')
>
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x9c in position
> 1: ordinal not in range(128)
> (why does this not work?)

Already unicode(media) "doesn't work", so naturally(?)
unicode(media).whatever() won't be better -- whatever won't be called.

>
> # mapString is a unicode string (i think at least)>> print "'" + mapString + "'"
>
> ' yu_200703_hello\ 831 v1234.9874 '
>
> >>    mystr = "%s %s" % (mapString, media)
>
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x9c in position
> 1: ordinal not in range(128)
>
> >> mystr = "%s %s" % (mapString.encode('utf-8'), media.encode('utf-8'))
>
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x9c in position
> 1: ordinal not in range(128)

This is merely repeating the original problem.

>
> I don't know what to do. I just want to concatenate two string where
> apparently one is a binary string, the other one is a unicode string
> and I always seem to get this error.
>
> Any help is appreciated :)

We need a clue or two; do this and let us know what it says:

print type(media), repr(media)
print type(mapString), repr(mapString)
import sys; print sys.stdout.encoding

Also you say that "print media" works. Do you mean that it produces
some meaningful text that you understand? What I see on the screen in
Google Groups is the following 6 characters:
LATIN SMALL LETTER X
KATAKANA LETTER WA
KATAKANA LETTER YU
KATAKANA LETTER RO
LEFT SQUARE BRACKET
KATAKANA LETTER YO
Is that what you see?

What is it that you call "win32 console"?