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

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 1:10 PM, Paul Rubin <no.email at nospam.invalid> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>> I don't have a Python example of parsing a huge string, but I've done
>> it in other languages, and when I can depend on indexing being a cheap
>> operation, I'll happily do exactly that.
>
> I'd be interested to know what the context was, where you parsed
> a big unicode string in a way that required random access to
> the nth character in the string.

It's something I've done in C/C++ fairly often. Take one big fat
buffer, slice it and dice it as you get the information you want out
of it. I'll retain and/or calculate indices (when I'm not using
pointers, but that's a different kettle of fish). Generally, I'm
working with pure ASCII, but port those same algorithms to Python and
you'll easily be able to read in a file in some known encoding and
manipulate it as Unicode.

It's not so much 'random access to the nth character' as an efficient
way of jumping forward. For instance, if I know that the next thing is
a literal string of n characters (that I don't care about), I want to
skip over that and keep parsing. The Adobe Message Format is
particularly noteworthy in this, but it's a stupid format and I don't
recommend people spend too much time reading up on it (unless you like
that sensation of your brain trying to escape through your ear).

ChrisA