Core Python Programming (2nd Edition)

Exceptions
UnicodeError is defined in the exceptions module as a subclass of ValueError. All exceptions related to
Unicode encoding/decoding should be subclasses of UnicodeError. See also the string encode() method.
Standard Encodings
Table 6.9 presents an extremely short list of the more common encodings used in Python. For a more
complete listing, please see the Python Documentation. Here is an online link:
http://docs.python.org/lib/standard-encodings.html
RE Engine Unicode-Aware
The regular expression engine should be Unicode aware. See the re Code Module sidebar in Section 6.9.
Table 6.9. Common Unicode Codecs/Encodings
Codec Description
utf-8 8-bit variable length encoding (default encoding)
utf-16 16-bit variable length encoding (little/big endian)
utf-16-le UTF-16 but explicitly little endian
utf-16-be UTF-16 but explicitly big endian
ascii 7-bit ASCII codepage
iso-8859-1 ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) codepage
unicode-escape (See Python Unicode Constructors for a definition)
raw-unicode-escape (See Python Unicode Constructors for a definition)
native Dump of the internal format used by Python
String Format Operator
For Python format strings: %s performs str(u) for Unicode objects embedded in Python strings, so the
output will be u.encode(). If the format string is a Unicode object, all parameters are
coerced to Unicode first and then put together and formatted according to the format string. Numbers
are first converted to strings and then to Unicode. Python strings are interpreted as Unicode strings
using the . Unicode objects are taken as is. All other string formatters should work
accordingly. Here is an example:
u"%s %s" % (u"abc", "abc") u"abc abc"