Right solution to unicode error?

[Prasad, Ramit]

wxjmfauth at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> Le jeudi 8 novembre 2012 19:49:24 UTC+1, Ian a écrit :
> > On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 11:32 AM, Oscar Benjamin
> >
> > <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > If I want the other characters to work I need to change the code page:
> > >
> > > O:\>chcp 65001
> > > Active code page: 65001
> > >
> > > O:\>Q:\tools\Python33\python -c "import sys;
> > > sys.stdout.buffer.write('\u03b1\n'.encode('utf-8'))"
> > > α
> > >
> > > O:\>Q:\tools\Python33\python -c "import sys;
> > > sys.stdout.buffer.write('\u03b1\n'.encode(sys.stdout.en
> > > coding))"
> > > α
> >
> > I find that I also need to change the font.  With the default font,
> >
> > printing '\u2013' gives me:
> > –
> >
> > The only alternative font option I have in Windows XP is Lucida
> > Console, which at least works correctly, although it seems to be
> > lacking a lot of glyphs.
> 
> --------
> 
> Font has nothing to do here.
> You are "simply" wrongly encoding your "unicode".
> 


Why would font not matter? Unicode is the abstract definition 
of all characters right? From that we map the abstract 
character to a code page/set, which gives real values for an
abstract character. From that code page we then visually display 
the "real value" based on the font. If that font does
not have a glyph for a specific character page (or a different
glyph) then that is a problem and not related encoding. 

Unicode->code page->font


> >>> '\u2013'
> '–'
> >>> '\u2013'.encode('utf-8')
> b'\xe2\x80\x93'
> >>> '\u2013'.encode('utf-8').decode('cp1252')
> '–'
> 

This is a mismatched translation between code pages; not
font related but is instead one abstraction "level" up. 


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