translating foreign data

[Steven D'Aprano]

From: Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info>

On Fri, 22 Jun 2018 20:06:35 +0100, Ben Bacarisse wrote:

> Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> writes:
>
>> On Fri, 22 Jun 2018 11:14:59 +0100, Ben Bacarisse wrote:
>>
>>>>> The code page remark is curious.  Will some "code pages" have digits
>>>>> that are not ASCII digits?
>>>>
>>>> Good question.  I have no idea.
>>>
>>> It's much more of an open question than I thought.
>>
>> Nah, Python already solves that for you:
>
> My understanding was that the OP does not (reliably) know the encoding,
> though that was a guess based on a turn of phrase.

I took it the other way: that Ethan *does* know the encoding, and his problem
is that knowing the encoding and/or locale is not enough to recognise whether
to use a period or comma as the decimal separator.

Which it isn't.

If he doesn't know the encoding, he has bigger problems than just converting
strings into floats. Without knowing the encoding, he cannot even reliably
detect non-ASCII digits at all.


> Another guess is that the OP does not have Unicode data.  The term "code
> page" hints at an 8-bit encoding or at least a pre-Unicode one.

Assuming he is using Python 3, or using Python 2 sensibly, once he has
specified the encoding and read the data from the file, he has Unicode.

Unicode is a superset of (ideally) all code pages. Once you have decoded the
data using the appropriate code page, you have a Unicode string, and Python
doesn't care where it came from.

The point is, once Ethan can get the intended characters out of the file into
Python, it doesn't matter what code page they came from. They're now
full-fledged Unicode characters, and Python's float() and int() functions can
easily deal with non-ASCII digits. So long as he has digits in the first place,
 float() and int() will deal with them correctly.


--
Steven D'Aprano
"Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing it everywhere."
 -- Jon Ronson

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