If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve heard about Unicode before that magical system that lets us use all sorts of fancy characters in our code without having to resort to weird hacks or workarounds. But what exactly is it? And how does Python handle it?

Let’s start with the basics: Unicode is a standard for representing text using unique codes, rather than relying on specific character sets like ASCII (which only covers basic Latin letters). This means that we can use characters from all sorts of languages and scripts in our code without having to worry about compatibility issues.

Now, Python specifically. Since version 3.0, the language has supported Unicode strings out-of-the-box meaning you don’t have to do anything special to use them! Any string created using “unicode rocks!” or ‘unicode rocks!’ will be stored as a Unicode string in your code.

But what about when we want to read and write files that contain non-ASCII characters? That’s where Python’s built-in encoding system comes into play. By default, Python uses UTF-8 (a popular encoding for Unicode) to handle text input/output so you can simply include a Unicode character in your string literals without having to worry about any extra steps!

For example:
try:
with open(‘/tmp/input.txt’, ‘r’) as f:
…
except OSError:
# ‘File not found’ error message.
print(“Fichier non trouvé”)

In this code snippet, we’re opening a file called “input.txt” in read mode (using the ‘r’ flag), and if an error occurs while trying to open it, we’re printing out a French-language error message using Python’s built-in print() function!

But what about when you want to work with Unicode strings directly? Maybe you have some data that needs to be processed in memory before being written back to disk. In this case, you can use Python’s string methods to manipulate your Unicode strings just like any other string but with a few important differences!

For example:
my_string = “Hello, world!” # This is a regular ASCII string
print(len(my_string)) # Output: 13 (including spaces)

my_unicode_string = “Hola, mundo!” # This is a Unicode string with non-ASCII characters
print(len(my_unicode_string)) # Output: 14 (including spaces and accents!)

As you can see from this example, working with Unicode strings in Python is pretty straightforward but it’s important to remember that they behave differently than regular ASCII strings! In particular, the length of a Unicode string will be affected by any non-ASCII characters included within it.

Whether you’re reading/writing files or manipulating data directly in memory, Python makes it easy to handle all sorts of textual data no matter what language or script it comes from.