inserting Unicode character in dictionary - Python

[gitaziabari at gmail.com]

On Oct 17, 2:38 pm, Joe Strout <j... at strout.net> wrote:
> Thanks for the answers.  That clears things up quite a bit.
>
> >> What if your source file is set to utf-8?  Do you then have a proper
> >> UTF-8 string, but the problem is that none of the standard Python
> >> library methods know how to properly interpret UTF-8?
>
> > Well, the decode method knows how to decode that bytes into a
> > `unicode`
> > object if you call it with 'utf-8' as argument.
>
> OK, good to know.
>
> >> 4. In Python 3.0, this silliness goes away, because all strings are
> >> Unicode by default.
>
> > Yes and no.  The problem just shifts because at some point you get
> > into
> > similar troubles, just in the other direction.  Data enters the
> > program
> > as bytes and must leave it as bytes again, so you have to deal with
> > encodings at those points.
>
> Yes, but that's still much better than having to litter your code with
> 'u' prefixes and .decode calls and so on.  If I'm using a UTF-8-savvy
> text editor (as we all should be doing in the 21st century!), and type
> "foo = '2π'", I should get a string containing a '2' and a pi
> character, and all the text operations (like counting characters,
> etc.) should Just Work.
>
> When I read and write files or sockets or whatever, of course I'll
> have to think about what encoding the text should be... but internal
> to my own source code, I shouldn't have to.
>
> I understand the need for a transition strategy, which is what we have
> in 2.x, and that's working well enough.  But I'll be glad when it's
> over.  :)
>
> Cheers,
> - Joe

Thanks for the answers. The following factors should be considerd when
dealing with unicode characters in python:
1. Declaring # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- at the top of script
2. Opening files with appropriate encoding:
txt = codecs.open (filename, 'w+', encoding='utf-8')

My program works fine now. There is no specific way of adding unicode
characters in list or dictionaies. The character itself has to be in
unicode.

Cheers,

Gita