Develop Reference

Error in the coding of the characters in reading a PDF

I need to read this PDF.
I am using the following code:
from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader
f = open('myfile.pdf', 'rb')
reader = PdfFileReader(f)
content = reader.getPage(0).extractText()
f.close()
content = ' '.join(content.replace('\xa0', ' ').strip().split())
print(content)
However, the encoding is incorrect, it prints:
Resultado da Prova de Sele“‰o do...
But I expected
Resultado da Prova de Seleção do...
How to solve it?
I'm using Python 3

The PyPDF2 extractTest method returns UniCode. So you many need to just explicitly encode it. For example, explicitly encoding the Unicode into UTF-8.
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
correct = u'Resultado da Prova de Seleção do...'
print(correct.encode(encoding='utf-8'))
You're on Python 3, so you have Unicode under the hood, and Python 3 defaults to UTF-8. But I wonder if you need to specify a different encoding based on your locale.
# Show installed locales
import locale
from pprint import pprint
pprint(locale.locale_alias)
If that's not the quick fix, since you're getting Unicode back from PyPDF, you could take a look at the code points for those two characters. It's possible that PyPDF wasn't able to determine the correct encoding and gave you the wrong characters.
For example, a quick and dirty comparison of the good and bad strings you posted:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# Python 3.4
incorrect = 'Resultado da Prova de Sele“‰o do'
correct = 'Resultado da Prova de Seleção do...'
print("Incorrect String")
print("CHAR{}UNI".format(' ' * 20))
print("-" * 50)
for char in incorrect:
print(
'{}{}{}'.format(
char.encode(encoding='utf-8'),
' ' * 20, # Hack; Byte objects don't have __format__
ord(char)
)
)
print("\n" * 2)
print("Correct String")
print("CHAR{}UNI".format(' ' * 20))
print("-" * 50)
for char in correct:
print(
'{}{}{}'.format(
char.encode(encoding='utf-8'),
' ' * 20, # Hack; Byte objects don't have __format__
ord(char)
)
)
Relevant Output:
b'\xe2\x80\x9c' 8220
b'\xe2\x80\xb0' 8240
b'\xc3\xa7' 231
b'\xc3\xa3' 227
If you're getting code point 231, (>>>hex(231) # '0xe7) then you're getting back bad data back from PyPDF.

what i have tried is to replace specific " ' " unicode with "’" which solves this issue. Please let me know if u still failed to generate pdf with this approach.
text = text.replace("'", "’")

Writing to UTF-16-LE text file with BOM

I've read a few postings regarding Python writing to text files but I could not find a solution to my problem. Here it is in a nutshell.
The requirement: to write values delimited by thorn characters (u00FE; and surronding the text values) and the pilcrow character (u00B6; after each column) to a UTF-16LE text file with BOM (FF FE).
The issue: The written-to text file has whitespace between each column that I did not script for. Also, it's not showing up right in UltraEdit. Only the first value ("mom") shows. I welcome any insight or advice.
The script (simplified to ease troubleshooting; the actual script uses a third-party API to obtain the list of values):
import os
import codecs
import shutil
import sys
import codecs
first = u''
textdel = u'\u00FE'.encode('utf_16_le') #thorn
fielddel = u'\u00B6'.encode('utf_16_le') #pilcrow
list1 = ['mom', 'dad', 'son']
num = len(list1) #pretend this is from the metadata profile
f = codecs.open('c:/myFile.txt', 'w', 'utf_16_le')
f.write(u'\uFEFF')
for item in list1:
mytext2 = u''
i = 0
i = i + 1
mytext2 = mytext2 + item + textdel
if i < (num - 1):
mytext2 = mytext2 + fielddel
f.write(mytext2 + u'\n')
f.close()

You're double-encoding your strings. You've already opened your file as UTF-16-LE, so leave your textdel and fielddel strings unencoded. They will get encoded at write time along with every line written to the file.
Or put another way, textdel = u'\u00FE' sets textdel to the "thorn" character, while textdel = u'\u00FE'.encode('utf-16-le') sets textdel to a particular serialized form of that character, a sequence of bytes according to that codec; it is no longer a sequence of characters:
textdel = u'\u00FE'
len(textdel) # -> 1
type(textdel) # -> unicode
len(textdel.encode('utf-16-le')) # -> 2
type(textdel.encode('utf-16-le')) # -> str

Python - regex parsing file

I have a file like this
module modulename(wire1, wire2, \wire3[0], \wire3[1], \wire3[2], wire4, wire5,wire6, wire7, \wire8[0], wire9); nonmodule modulename(wire1, wire2, \wire3[0], \wire3[1], \wire3[2], wire4, wire5,wire6, wire7, \wire8[0], wire9)
i want to change this string to
module modulename(wire1, wire2, wire3[0:2],wire4, wire5, wire6, wire7,wire8[0],wire9) ; nonmodule modulename(wire1, wire2, wire3[0], wire3[1], wire3[2], wire4, wire5,wire6, wire7, wire8[0], wire9)
so basically remove \ and delete individual copies of wires and change size to [start:stop] when the starting keyword is module and just removing slashes when starting keyword after ";" is not module
If i can parse it with regex i can do the rest, i am trying the code below but its not matching anything. the code is modified from -pattern to dictionary of lists Python
lines=f.read()
d = defaultdict(list)
module_pattern = r'(\w+)\s(\w+)\(([^;]+)'
mod_rex = re.compile(module_pattern)
wire_pattern = r'(\w+)\s[\\]?(\w+)['
wire_rex = re.compile(wire_pattern)
for match in mod_rex.finditer(lines):
#print '\n'.join(match.groups())
module, instance, wires = match.groups()
for match in wire_rex.finditer(wires):
wire, connection = match.groups()
#print '\t', wire, connection
d[wire].append((module, instance, connection))
for k, v in d.items():
print k, ':', v
Help is appreciated , havent been able to identify the tokens.

This should get you started. I'm not sure of what assumptions you can make about your file format, but it should be straightforward enough to modify this code to suit your needs.
Also, I assumed that the ordering of the ports was strict, so they have been left unmodified. This is also the reason I didn't use dicts.
This code will strip out all backslashes and collapse adjacent bits into vectors. This will also handle vectors that do not start at 0 (for example someport[3:8]). I also chose to make single bit vectors say [0:0] rather than [0].
import re
import sys
mod_re = re.compile(r'module\s*([^(]+)\(([^)]*)\);(.*)')
wire_re = re.compile(r'([^[]+)\[([0-9]+)\]')
def process(line):
# Get rid of all backslashes. You can make this more selective if you want
clean = line.replace('\\', '')
m = mod_re.search(clean)
if m:
ports = []
mod_name, wires, remaining = m.groups()
for wire in wires.split(','):
wire = wire.replace(' ', '')
m = wire_re.search(wire)
if m:
# Found a vector
n = int(m.group(2))
prev_wire, _ = ports[-1]
# If previous port was a vector, tack on next value
if prev_wire == m.group(1):
ports[-1][1][1] = n
else:
ports.append((m.group(1), [n, n]))
else:
# Found a scalar
ports.append((wire, None))
# Stringify ports
out = []
for port in ports:
name, val = port
if val is None:
out.append(name)
else:
start, end = val
out.append('%s[%s:%s]' % (name, start, end))
print 'module %s(%s); %s' % (mod_name, ', '.join(out), remaining)
f = open(sys.argv[1], 'r')
if f:
for l in f.readlines():
process(l)
f.close()
Output:
module modulename(wire1, wire2, wire3[0:2], wire4, wire5, wire6, wire7, wire8[0:0], wire9); nonmodule modulename(wire1, wire2, wire3[0], wire3[1], wire3[2], wire4, wire5,wire6, wire7, wire8[0], wire9)
PS: I don't know what exactly you are trying to do, but changing the module definition will also require changing the instantiation as well.
EDIT: Removed with keyword when opening file for Python2.5 support.

it seems like you're removing \ regardless if where it is, so replace them after performing this pattern
(\bmodule\b[^()]+\([^;]*?)(\\wire(\d+)\[(\d+)\][^;]*\wire\3\[(\d+)\])
and replace w/ \1wire\3[\4:\5]
Demo
per comment try new pattern
(\bmodule\b[^\\;]+)\\([^[]+)\[(\d+)\][^;]+\2\[(\d+)\]
Demo

Exporting to CSV Format In UTF-8 Format [duplicate]

I have a UTF-16 CSV file which I have to read. Python csv module does not seem to support UTF-16.
I am using python 2.7.2. CSV files I need to parse are huge size running into several GBs of data.
Answers for John Machin questions below
print repr(open('test.csv', 'rb').read(100))
Output with test.csv having just abc as content
'\xff\xfea\x00b\x00c\x00'
I think csv file got created on windows machine in USA. I am using Mac OSX Lion.
If I use code provided by phihag and test.csv containing one record.
sample test.csv content used. Below is print repr(open('test.csv', 'rb').read(1000)) output
'\xff\xfe1\x00,\x002\x00,\x00G\x00,\x00S\x00,\x00H\x00 \x00f\x00\xfc\x00r\x00 \x00e\x00 \x00\x96\x00 \x00m\x00 \x00\x85\x00,\x00,\x00I\x00\r\x00\n\x00'
Code by phihag
import codecs
import csv
with open('test.csv','rb') as f:
sr = codecs.StreamRecoder(f,codecs.getencoder('utf-8'),codecs.getdecoder('utf-8'),codecs.getreader('utf-16'),codecs.getwriter('utf-16'))
for row in csv.reader(sr):
print row
Output of the above code
['1', '2', 'G', 'S', 'H f\xc3\xbcr e \xc2\x96 m \xc2\x85']
['', '', 'I']
expected output is
['1', '2', 'G', 'S', 'H f\xc3\xbcr e \xc2\x96 m \xc2\x85','','I']

At the moment, the csv module does not support UTF-16.
In Python 3.x, csv expects a text-mode file and you can simply use the encoding parameter of open to force another encoding:
# Python 3.x only
import csv
with open('utf16.csv', 'r', encoding='utf16') as csvf:
for line in csv.reader(csvf):
print(line) # do something with the line
In Python 2.x, you can recode the input:
# Python 2.x only
import codecs
import csv
class Recoder(object):
def __init__(self, stream, decoder, encoder, eol='\r\n'):
self._stream = stream
self._decoder = decoder if isinstance(decoder, codecs.IncrementalDecoder) else codecs.getincrementaldecoder(decoder)()
self._encoder = encoder if isinstance(encoder, codecs.IncrementalEncoder) else codecs.getincrementalencoder(encoder)()
self._buf = ''
self._eol = eol
self._reachedEof = False
def read(self, size=None):
r = self._stream.read(size)
raw = self._decoder.decode(r, size is None)
return self._encoder.encode(raw)
def __iter__(self):
return self
def __next__(self):
if self._reachedEof:
raise StopIteration()
while True:
line,eol,rest = self._buf.partition(self._eol)
if eol == self._eol:
self._buf = rest
return self._encoder.encode(line + eol)
raw = self._stream.read(1024)
if raw == '':
self._decoder.decode(b'', True)
self._reachedEof = True
return self._encoder.encode(self._buf)
self._buf += self._decoder.decode(raw)
next = __next__
def close(self):
return self._stream.close()
with open('test.csv','rb') as f:
sr = Recoder(f, 'utf-16', 'utf-8')
for row in csv.reader(sr):
print (row)
open and codecs.open require the file to start with a BOM. If it doesn't (or you're on Python 2.x), you can still convert it in memory, like this:
try:
from io import BytesIO
except ImportError: # Python < 2.6
from StringIO import StringIO as BytesIO
import csv
with open('utf16.csv', 'rb') as binf:
c = binf.read().decode('utf-16').encode('utf-8')
for line in csv.reader(BytesIO(c)):
print(line) # do something with the line

The Python 2.x csv module documentation example shows how to handle other encodings.

I would strongly suggest that you recode your file(s) to UTF-8. Under the very likely condition that you don't have any Unicode characters outside the BMP, you can take advantage of the fact that UTF-16 is a fixed-length encoding to read fixed-length blocks from your input file without worrying about straddling block boundaries.
Step 1: Determine what encoding you actually have. Examine the first few bytes of your file:
print repr(open('thefile.csv', 'rb').read(100))
Four possible ways of encoding u'abc'
\xfe\xff\x00a\x00b\x00c -> utf_16
\xff\xfea\x00b\x00c\x00 -> utf_16
\x00a\x00b\x00c -> utf_16_be
a\x00b\x00c\x00 -> utf_16_le
If you have any trouble with this step, edit your question to include the results of the above print repr()
Step 2: Here's a Python 2.X recode-UTF-16*-to-UTF-8 script:
import sys
infname, outfname, enc = sys.argv[1:4]
fi = open(infname, 'rb')
fo = open(outfname, 'wb')
BUFSIZ = 64 * 1024 * 1024
first = True
while 1:
buf = fi.read(BUFSIZ)
if not buf: break
if first and enc == 'utf_16':
bom = buf[:2]
buf = buf[2:]
enc = {'\xfe\xff': 'utf_16_be', '\xff\xfe': 'utf_16_le'}[bom]
# KeyError means file doesn't start with a valid BOM
first = False
fo.write(buf.decode(enc).encode('utf8'))
fi.close()
fo.close()
Other matters:
You say that your files are too big to read the whole file, recode and rewrite, yet you can open it in vi. Please explain.
The <85> being treated as end of record is a bit of a worry. Looks like 0x85 is being recognised as NEL (C1 control code, NEWLINE). There is a strong possibility that the data was originally encoded in some legacy single-byte encoding where 0x85 has a meaning but has been transcoded to UTF-16 under the false assumption that the original encoding was ISO-8859-1 aka latin1. Where did the file originate? An IBM mainframe? Windows/Unix/classic Mac? What country, locale, language? You obviously think that the <85> is not meant to be a newline; what do you think that it means?
Please feel free to send a copy of a cut-down file (that includes some of the <85> stuff) to sjmachin at lexicon dot net
Update based on 1-line sample data provided.
This confirms my suspicions. Read this. Here's a quote from it:
... the C1 control characters ... are rarely used directly, except on
specific platforms such as OpenVMS. When they turn up in documents,
Web pages, e-mail messages, etc., which are ostensibly in an
ISO-8859-n encoding, their code positions generally refer instead to
the characters at that position in a proprietary, system-specific
encoding such as Windows-1252 or the Apple Macintosh ("MacRoman")
character set that use the codes provided for representation of the C1
set with a single 8-bit byte to instead provide additional graphic
characters
This code:
s1 = '\xff\xfe1\x00,\x002\x00,\x00G\x00,\x00S\x00,\x00H\x00 \x00f\x00\xfc\x00r\x00 \x00e\x00 \x00\x96\x00 \x00m\x00 \x00\x85\x00,\x00,\x00I\x00\r\x00\n\x00'
s2 = s1.decode('utf16')
print 's2 repr:', repr(s2)
from unicodedata import name
from collections import Counter
non_ascii = Counter(c for c in s2 if c >= u'\x80')
print 'non_ascii:', non_ascii
for c in non_ascii:
print "from: U+%04X %s" % (ord(c), name(c, "<no name>"))
c2 = c.encode('latin1').decode('cp1252')
print "to: U+%04X %s" % (ord(c2), name(c2, "<no name>"))
s3 = u''.join(
c.encode('latin1').decode('1252') if u'\x80' <= c < u'\xA0' else c
for c in s2
)
print 's3 repr:', repr(s3)
print 's3:', s3
produces the following (Python 2.7.2 IDLE, Windows 7):
s2 repr: u'1,2,G,S,H f\xfcr e \x96 m \x85,,I\r\n'
non_ascii: Counter({u'\x85': 1, u'\xfc': 1, u'\x96': 1})
from: U+0085 <no name>
to: U+2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS
from: U+00FC LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
to: U+00FC LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
from: U+0096 <no name>
to: U+2013 EN DASH
s3 repr: u'1,2,G,S,H f\xfcr e \u2013 m \u2026,,I\r\n'
s3: 1,2,G,S,H für e – m …,,I
Which do you think is a more reasonable interpretation of \x96:
SPA i.e. Start of Protected Area (Used by block-oriented terminals.)
or
EN DASH
?
Looks like a thorough analysis of a much larger data sample is warranted. Happy to help.

Just open your file with codecs.open like in
import codecs, csv
stream = codecs.open(<yourfile.csv>, encoding="utf-16")
reader = csv.reader(stream)
And work through your program with unicode strings, as you should do anyway if you are processing text

Python UTF-16 CSV reader

I have a UTF-16 CSV file which I have to read. Python csv module does not seem to support UTF-16.
I am using python 2.7.2. CSV files I need to parse are huge size running into several GBs of data.
Answers for John Machin questions below
print repr(open('test.csv', 'rb').read(100))
Output with test.csv having just abc as content
'\xff\xfea\x00b\x00c\x00'
I think csv file got created on windows machine in USA. I am using Mac OSX Lion.
If I use code provided by phihag and test.csv containing one record.
sample test.csv content used. Below is print repr(open('test.csv', 'rb').read(1000)) output
'\xff\xfe1\x00,\x002\x00,\x00G\x00,\x00S\x00,\x00H\x00 \x00f\x00\xfc\x00r\x00 \x00e\x00 \x00\x96\x00 \x00m\x00 \x00\x85\x00,\x00,\x00I\x00\r\x00\n\x00'
Code by phihag
import codecs
import csv
with open('test.csv','rb') as f:
sr = codecs.StreamRecoder(f,codecs.getencoder('utf-8'),codecs.getdecoder('utf-8'),codecs.getreader('utf-16'),codecs.getwriter('utf-16'))
for row in csv.reader(sr):
print row
Output of the above code
['1', '2', 'G', 'S', 'H f\xc3\xbcr e \xc2\x96 m \xc2\x85']
['', '', 'I']
expected output is
['1', '2', 'G', 'S', 'H f\xc3\xbcr e \xc2\x96 m \xc2\x85','','I']

At the moment, the csv module does not support UTF-16.
In Python 3.x, csv expects a text-mode file and you can simply use the encoding parameter of open to force another encoding:
# Python 3.x only
import csv
with open('utf16.csv', 'r', encoding='utf16') as csvf:
for line in csv.reader(csvf):
print(line) # do something with the line
In Python 2.x, you can recode the input:
# Python 2.x only
import codecs
import csv
class Recoder(object):
def __init__(self, stream, decoder, encoder, eol='\r\n'):
self._stream = stream
self._decoder = decoder if isinstance(decoder, codecs.IncrementalDecoder) else codecs.getincrementaldecoder(decoder)()
self._encoder = encoder if isinstance(encoder, codecs.IncrementalEncoder) else codecs.getincrementalencoder(encoder)()
self._buf = ''
self._eol = eol
self._reachedEof = False
def read(self, size=None):
r = self._stream.read(size)
raw = self._decoder.decode(r, size is None)
return self._encoder.encode(raw)
def __iter__(self):
return self
def __next__(self):
if self._reachedEof:
raise StopIteration()
while True:
line,eol,rest = self._buf.partition(self._eol)
if eol == self._eol:
self._buf = rest
return self._encoder.encode(line + eol)
raw = self._stream.read(1024)
if raw == '':
self._decoder.decode(b'', True)
self._reachedEof = True
return self._encoder.encode(self._buf)
self._buf += self._decoder.decode(raw)
next = __next__
def close(self):
return self._stream.close()
with open('test.csv','rb') as f:
sr = Recoder(f, 'utf-16', 'utf-8')
for row in csv.reader(sr):
print (row)
open and codecs.open require the file to start with a BOM. If it doesn't (or you're on Python 2.x), you can still convert it in memory, like this:
try:
from io import BytesIO
except ImportError: # Python < 2.6
from StringIO import StringIO as BytesIO
import csv
with open('utf16.csv', 'rb') as binf:
c = binf.read().decode('utf-16').encode('utf-8')
for line in csv.reader(BytesIO(c)):
print(line) # do something with the line

The Python 2.x csv module documentation example shows how to handle other encodings.

I would strongly suggest that you recode your file(s) to UTF-8. Under the very likely condition that you don't have any Unicode characters outside the BMP, you can take advantage of the fact that UTF-16 is a fixed-length encoding to read fixed-length blocks from your input file without worrying about straddling block boundaries.
Step 1: Determine what encoding you actually have. Examine the first few bytes of your file:
print repr(open('thefile.csv', 'rb').read(100))
Four possible ways of encoding u'abc'
\xfe\xff\x00a\x00b\x00c -> utf_16
\xff\xfea\x00b\x00c\x00 -> utf_16
\x00a\x00b\x00c -> utf_16_be
a\x00b\x00c\x00 -> utf_16_le
If you have any trouble with this step, edit your question to include the results of the above print repr()
Step 2: Here's a Python 2.X recode-UTF-16*-to-UTF-8 script:
import sys
infname, outfname, enc = sys.argv[1:4]
fi = open(infname, 'rb')
fo = open(outfname, 'wb')
BUFSIZ = 64 * 1024 * 1024
first = True
while 1:
buf = fi.read(BUFSIZ)
if not buf: break
if first and enc == 'utf_16':
bom = buf[:2]
buf = buf[2:]
enc = {'\xfe\xff': 'utf_16_be', '\xff\xfe': 'utf_16_le'}[bom]
# KeyError means file doesn't start with a valid BOM
first = False
fo.write(buf.decode(enc).encode('utf8'))
fi.close()
fo.close()
Other matters:
You say that your files are too big to read the whole file, recode and rewrite, yet you can open it in vi. Please explain.
The <85> being treated as end of record is a bit of a worry. Looks like 0x85 is being recognised as NEL (C1 control code, NEWLINE). There is a strong possibility that the data was originally encoded in some legacy single-byte encoding where 0x85 has a meaning but has been transcoded to UTF-16 under the false assumption that the original encoding was ISO-8859-1 aka latin1. Where did the file originate? An IBM mainframe? Windows/Unix/classic Mac? What country, locale, language? You obviously think that the <85> is not meant to be a newline; what do you think that it means?
Please feel free to send a copy of a cut-down file (that includes some of the <85> stuff) to sjmachin at lexicon dot net
Update based on 1-line sample data provided.
This confirms my suspicions. Read this. Here's a quote from it:
... the C1 control characters ... are rarely used directly, except on
specific platforms such as OpenVMS. When they turn up in documents,
Web pages, e-mail messages, etc., which are ostensibly in an
ISO-8859-n encoding, their code positions generally refer instead to
the characters at that position in a proprietary, system-specific
encoding such as Windows-1252 or the Apple Macintosh ("MacRoman")
character set that use the codes provided for representation of the C1
set with a single 8-bit byte to instead provide additional graphic
characters
This code:
s1 = '\xff\xfe1\x00,\x002\x00,\x00G\x00,\x00S\x00,\x00H\x00 \x00f\x00\xfc\x00r\x00 \x00e\x00 \x00\x96\x00 \x00m\x00 \x00\x85\x00,\x00,\x00I\x00\r\x00\n\x00'
s2 = s1.decode('utf16')
print 's2 repr:', repr(s2)
from unicodedata import name
from collections import Counter
non_ascii = Counter(c for c in s2 if c >= u'\x80')
print 'non_ascii:', non_ascii
for c in non_ascii:
print "from: U+%04X %s" % (ord(c), name(c, "<no name>"))
c2 = c.encode('latin1').decode('cp1252')
print "to: U+%04X %s" % (ord(c2), name(c2, "<no name>"))
s3 = u''.join(
c.encode('latin1').decode('1252') if u'\x80' <= c < u'\xA0' else c
for c in s2
)
print 's3 repr:', repr(s3)
print 's3:', s3
produces the following (Python 2.7.2 IDLE, Windows 7):
s2 repr: u'1,2,G,S,H f\xfcr e \x96 m \x85,,I\r\n'
non_ascii: Counter({u'\x85': 1, u'\xfc': 1, u'\x96': 1})
from: U+0085 <no name>
to: U+2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS
from: U+00FC LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
to: U+00FC LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH DIAERESIS
from: U+0096 <no name>
to: U+2013 EN DASH
s3 repr: u'1,2,G,S,H f\xfcr e \u2013 m \u2026,,I\r\n'
s3: 1,2,G,S,H für e – m …,,I
Which do you think is a more reasonable interpretation of \x96:
SPA i.e. Start of Protected Area (Used by block-oriented terminals.)
or
EN DASH
?
Looks like a thorough analysis of a much larger data sample is warranted. Happy to help.

Just open your file with codecs.open like in
import codecs, csv
stream = codecs.open(<yourfile.csv>, encoding="utf-16")
reader = csv.reader(stream)
And work through your program with unicode strings, as you should do anyway if you are processing text