How do I display unicode value stored in a string variable using ord()

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 4:26 AM, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Can you explain the issue of "breaking surrogate pairs apart" a little
> more?  Switching between encodings based on the string contents seems
> silly at first glance.  Strings are immutable so I don't understand why
> not use UTF-8 or UTF-16 for everything.  UTF-8 is more efficient in
> Latin-based alphabets and UTF-16 may be more efficient for some other
> languages.  I think even UCS-4 doesn't completely fix the surrogate pair
> issue if it means the only thing I can think of.

UTF-8 is highly inefficient for indexing. Given a buffer of (say) a
few thousand bytes, how do you locate the 273rd character? You have to
scan from the beginning. The same applies when surrogate pairs are
used to represent single characters, unless the representation leaks
and a surrogate is indexed as two - which is where the breaking-apart
happens.

ChrisA