Do your eyes glaze over when someone mentions Unicode properties? In this article, we’re going to take a closer look into the world of Python and Unicode, and I promise it won’t be as painful as you might think.

To begin with: what are these “Unicode properties” everyone keeps talking about? Basically, they’re a database of information that comes with every defined code point in the Unicode standard. This includes stuff like character names (e.g., LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A), category (e.g., Lu for Latin uppercase letter), and display-related properties (e.g., bidirectional text).

Now, you might be wondering why we need all this extra information when we can just write code using plain old characters. Well, my friend, that’s where Python comes in. By default, Python uses UTF-8 encoding for both source code and the interpreter (since version 3.0). This means that if you want to use non-ASCII characters in your code, you can just write them directly into your script without any special formatting or escaping.

For example:

# Example using Unicode character 'Γειά' (Hello in Greek)
# Added a comment to explain the purpose of the script
print("Γειά") # Added parentheses to make it a function call and added a closing quotation mark to complete the string

That’s it! No need to mess around with escape sequences or anything fancy like that. But what if you want to access some of those fancy Unicode properties we mentioned earlier? Well, Python has a handy-dandy module called `unicodedata` that lets us do just that. Here’s an example:

import unicodedata # Importing the unicodedata module to access Unicode properties

u = "Γειά" # Assigning the Greek word for Hello to the variable u
print(unicodedata.category(u[0])) # Printing the category of the first character in u, which is 'Lu' for Latin uppercase letter
print(unicodedata.name(u[0])) # Printing the name of the first character in u, which is 'LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A'

Pretty cool, right? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Unicode properties in Python. If you want to learn more about this magical world, I highly recommend checking out PEP 263 and the official documentation on Unicode support in Python. But for now, let’s all take a moment to appreciate how much easier our lives have become thanks to these amazing tools.