Beazley 4E P.E.R, Page29: Unicode

[Terry Reedy]

On 7/13/2013 11:09 PM, vek.m1234 at gmail.com wrote:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17632246/beazley-4e-p-e-r-page29-unicode

Is this David Beazley? (You referred to 'DB' later.)

>  "directly writing a raw UTF-8 encoded string such as
> 'Jalape\xc3\xb1o' simply produces a nine-character string U+004A,
> U+0061, U+006C, U+0061, U+0070, U+0065, U+00C3, U+00B1, U+006F, which
> is probably not what you intended.This is because in UTF-8, the
> multi- byte sequence \xc3\xb1 is supposed to represent the single
> character U+00F1, not the two characters U+00C3 and U+00B1."
>
> My original question was: Shouldn't this be 8 characters - not 9? He
> says: \xc3\xb1 is supposed to represent the single character. However
> after some interaction with fellow Pythonistas i'm even more
> confused.
>
> With reference to the above para: 1. What does he mean by "writing a
> raw UTF-8 encoded string"??

As much respect as I have for DB, I think this is an impossible to parse 
confused statement, fueled by the Python 2 confusion between characters 
and bytes. I suggest forgetting it and the discussion that followed. 
Bytes as bytes can carry any digital information, just as modulated sine 
waves can carry any analog information. In both cases, one can regard 
them as either purely what they are or as encoding information in some 
other form.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy