Understanding Unicode in Python
Unicode is a universal character encoding standard that aims to provide a consistent way to represent and manipulate text across different languages and platforms. In Python, Unicode is the default character encoding, and it is essential to understand how to work with Unicode characters in your code.
What is Unicode?
Unicode is a character encoding standard that assigns a unique numerical value, called a code point, to each character. This allows for the representation of a vast number of characters from different writing systems, including Latin, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, and many others.
Importance of Unicode in Python
Python, being a widely-used programming language, needs to handle a variety of text data from different sources and languages. By default, Python 3 uses Unicode (UTF-8) as the standard character encoding, which ensures that your code can properly handle and display a wide range of characters.
Understanding Unicode Code Points
Each character in the Unicode standard is assigned a unique code point, which is a hexadecimal number that represents the character. For example, the code point for the letter "A" is U+0041, and the code point for the Chinese character "ä― " is U+4F60.
print(ord('A')) ## Output: 65
print(ord('ä― ')) ## Output: 20320
Unicode Character Representation in Python
In Python, you can represent Unicode characters in strings using the following methods:
- Unicode Literals: Prefix the string with the letter
u
to indicate that it contains Unicode characters.
text = u'Hello, ä― åĨ―!'
- Unicode Escape Sequences: Use the
\u
or \U
escape sequence to represent a Unicode code point.
text = 'Hello, \u4f60\u597d!'
text = 'Hello, \U0004f60\U00000021'
- Unicode Code Points: Use the built-in
chr()
function to convert a code point to its corresponding character.
text = ''.join(chr(code_point) for code_point in [20320, 22909])
Understanding these methods for representing Unicode characters in Python strings is crucial for working with diverse text data in your applications.