Python in financial services

[Laurent Pointal]

wxjmfauth at gmail.com wrote:

> I recommend to toy intensively with the 'EURO SIGN' in
> strings manipulations.
> 
> Py3: It may luckily work, Python may crash or fails (it raises
> unicode errors on valid string!).
> 
> Py2: It is safer and solid. There is however a subtility. 3rd
> party tools may consider the Euro as byte or as unicode and/or
> are missinterpreting it, leading to a huge missmatch.
> 
> Example: IDLE
> 
>>>> print 'EURO' * 10
> EURO  EURO  EURO  EURO  EURO  EURO  EURO  EURO  EURO  EURO
>>>> print u'EURO' * 10
>           
>>>> # result: nothing!
>>>> 

What version of Python do you use ?

With IDLE:

Python 3.4.0 (default, Apr 11 2014, 13:05:11) 
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license()" for more information.
>>> print("€"*10)
€€€€€€€€€€
>>> 

With IDLE and Python 2.7, there seem to be an encoding problem:

>>> s = u"€"*10
>>> >>> import sys
>>> sys.stdout.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> print s.encode("utf-8")
€€€€€€€€€€
>>> print s.encode("latin1")
€€€€€€€€€€

But with python2 on console, it works nicely:

laurent at litchi:~$ python
Python 2.7.6 (default, Mar 22 2014, 22:59:56) 
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more 
information.
>>> s = u'€'
>>> s*10
u'\u20ac\u20ac\u20ac\u20ac\u20ac\u20ac\u20ac\u20ac\u20ac\u20ac'
>>> print s*10
€€€€€€€€€€

> This is not specific to the Euro. I let as an
> exercise to *understand* which chars are suffering
> from this issue. (Py2 and Py3)
> 
> jmf
> 
> PS Go, Ruby, C#, TeX (unicode engines): never meet a problem.