Writing Unicode Data in Python

in

Today we’re going to talk about something that can make your code look like a bowl of spaghetti Unicode data.

First things first: what is Unicode? Well, it’s basically a way for computers to represent text using numbers instead of just plain old ASCII characters (you know, like “A” or “a”). This means that you can write code in Python that handles all sorts of fancy symbols and languages from around the world.

But wait there’s a catch! Writing Unicode data in Python is not as straightforward as it seems. Let me give you an example:

# This script prints "Hello, 世界!" to the console using Unicode characters

# Import the sys module to handle Unicode encoding
import sys

# Set the default encoding to UTF-8 to handle Unicode characters
sys.setdefaultencoding('UTF8')

# Define a string variable with the Unicode characters to be printed
unicode_string = "Hello, 世界!"

# Print the string to the console
print(unicode_string)

Looks pretty simple, right? Well, hold on there, cowboy. If you run this code in Python 2 (which is still used by some people for some reason), it will actually print “Hello, \xe4\xb8\xad!” instead of what we want. That’s because Python 2 uses a different encoding system called ASCII or Latin-1 to represent Unicode data.

But don’t freak out! In Python 3 (which is the version most people use nowadays), things are much simpler. You can just write your code like this:

# This script will print "Hello, 世界!" to the console in Python 3

# The print() function is used to display the specified content to the console
# In this case, it will display "Hello, 世界!"

# The content to be displayed is enclosed in parentheses and within quotation marks
# This is known as a string, which is a sequence of characters

# The "Hello, 世界!" string contains both ASCII and Unicode characters
# In Python 3, all strings are Unicode by default, so no special encoding is needed

# In Python 2, strings are represented using ASCII or Latin-1 encoding
# This can cause issues when trying to display Unicode characters, resulting in errors or incorrect output

# To avoid this, the "u" prefix can be added before the string to indicate it is Unicode
# However, this is not necessary in Python 3 as all strings are Unicode by default

# The print() function will automatically convert the Unicode characters to the appropriate encoding for the console

# Therefore, in Python 3, we can simply write the code as follows:

print("Hello, 世界!")

See? No need for any fancy escaping or encoding shenanigans. Just plain old Unicode goodness.

But wait what if you want to read and write Unicode data from a file? Well, that’s where things get interesting (and slightly more complicated). Let me give you an example:

# This script opens a file containing Unicode data and prints its contents to the console

# Open the "unicode_data.txt" file in Python 3 and assign it to the variable "f"
with open("unicode_data.txt", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    # Loop through each line in the file
    for line in f:
        # Print the line to the console without adding a new line at the end
        print(line, end='')

Notice that we’re using the “encoding” parameter when opening our file? This tells Python which character set to use when reading and writing Unicode data. In this case, we’re using UTF-8 (which is a popular encoding system for Unicode).

But what if you want to write some Unicode data back to that same file? Well, that’s where things get even more interesting:

# This script opens the "unicode_data.txt" file in Python 3 and appends new Unicode data to it.

# The "with" statement ensures that the file is automatically closed after the code block is executed.
# The "open" function takes in the file name, the mode of operation (in this case, "a" for append), and the encoding system to use (UTF-8).
with open("unicode_data.txt", mode="a", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    # A for loop is used to iterate through a list of Unicode data to be written to the file.
    for line in ["Γειά! ", "！"]:
        # The "write" function is used to write the Unicode data to the file.
        f.write(line)

Notice that we’re using the “mode” parameter to append some new data to our file? This is important because it tells Python how to handle writing to the file (in this case, we want to add some new lines at the end). And again, we’re using UTF-8 as our encoding system.

Remember: when working with Unicode data, always use the “encoding” parameter when opening files and be careful not to accidentally write ASCII or Latin-1 characters instead of Unicode.

SICORPS