Develop Reference

Importing unicode characters from YAML to Python [duplicate]

I'm trying to write out to a flat file some Chinese, or Russian or various non-English character-sets for testing purposes. I'm getting stuck on how to output a Unicode hex-decimal or decimal value to its corresponding character.
For example in Python, if you had a hard coded set of characters like абвгдежзийкл you would assign value = u"абвгдежзийкл" and no problem.
If however you had a single decimal or hex decimal like 1081 / 0439 stored in a variable and you wanted to print that out with it's corresponding actual character (and not just output 0x439) how would this be done? The Unicode decimal/hex value above refers to й.

Python 2: Use unichr():
>>> print(unichr(1081))
й
Python 3: Use chr():
>>> print(chr(1081))
й

So the answer to the question is:
convert the hexadecimal value to decimal with int(hex_value, 16)
then get the corresponding strin with chr().
To sum up:
>>> print(chr(int('0x897F', 16)))
西

While working on a project that included parsing some JSONs, I encountered a similar problem. I had a lot of strings that had all non-ASCII characters escaped like this:
>>> print(content)
\u0412\u044B j\u0435\u0441\u0442\u0435 \u0438\u0437 \u0420\u043E\u0441\u0441\u0438\u0438?
...
>>> print(content)
\u010Cemu jesi na\u010Dinal izu\u010Dati med\u017Euslovjansky jezyk?
Converting such mixes symbol-by-symbol with unichr() would be tedious. The solution I eventually decided on:
content.encode("utf8").decode("unicode-escape")
The first operation (encoding) produces bytestrings like this:
b'\\u0412\\u044B j\\u0435\\u0441\\u0442\\u0435 \\u0438\\u0437 \\u0420\\u043E\\u0441\\u0441\\u0438\\u0438?'
b'\\u010Cemu jesi na\\u010Dinal izu\\u010Dati med\\u017Euslovjansky jezyk?'
and the second operation (decoding) transforms the byte string into Unicode string but with \\ replaced by \, which "unpacks" the characters, giving the result like this:
Вы jесте из России?
Čemu jesi načinal izučati medžuslovjansky jezyk?

If you run into the error:
ValueError: unichr() arg not in range(0x10000) (narrow Python build)
While trying to convert your hex value using unichr, you can get around that error by doing something like:
>>> n = int('0001f600', 16)
>>> s = '\\U{:0>8X}'.format(n)
>>> s
'\\U0001F600'
>>> binary = s.decode('unicode-escape')
>>> print(binary)
😀

How to recover the text in url and convert text back? [duplicate]

I have a unicode string like "Tanım" which is encoded as "Tan%u0131m" somehow. How can i convert this encoded string back to original unicode.
Apparently urllib.unquote does not support unicode.

%uXXXX is a non-standard encoding scheme that has been rejected by the w3c, despite the fact that an implementation continues to live on in JavaScript land.
The more common technique seems to be to UTF-8 encode the string and then % escape the resulting bytes using %XX. This scheme is supported by urllib.unquote:
>>> urllib2.unquote("%0a")
'\n'
Unfortunately, if you really need to support %uXXXX, you will probably have to roll your own decoder. Otherwise, it is likely to be far more preferable to simply UTF-8 encode your unicode and then % escape the resulting bytes.
A more complete example:
>>> u"Tanım"
u'Tan\u0131m'
>>> url = urllib.quote(u"Tanım".encode('utf8'))
>>> urllib.unquote(url).decode('utf8')
u'Tan\u0131m'

def unquote(text):
def unicode_unquoter(match):
return unichr(int(match.group(1),16))
return re.sub(r'%u([0-9a-fA-F]{4})',unicode_unquoter,text)

This will do it if you absolutely have to have this (I really do agree with the cries of "non-standard"):
from urllib import unquote
def unquote_u(source):
result = unquote(source)
if '%u' in result:
result = result.replace('%u','\\u').decode('unicode_escape')
return result
print unquote_u('Tan%u0131m')
> Tanım

there is a bug in the above version where it freaks out sometimes when there are both ascii encoded and unicode encoded characters in the string. I think its specifically when there are characters from the upper 128 range like '\xab' in addition to unicode.
eg. "%5B%AB%u03E1%BB%5D" causes this error.
I found if you just did the unicode ones first, the problem went away:
def unquote_u(source):
result = source
if '%u' in result:
result = result.replace('%u','\\u').decode('unicode_escape')
result = unquote(result)
return result

You have a URL using a non-standard encoding scheme, rejected by standards bodies but still being produced by some encoders. The Python urllib.parse.unquote() function can't handle these.
Creating your own decoder is not that hard, luckily. %uhhhh entries are meant to be UTF-16 codepoints here, so we need to take surrogate pairs into account. I've also seen %hh codepoints mixed in, for added confusion.
With that in mind, here is a decoder which works in both Python 2 and Python 3, provided you pass in a str object in Python 3 (Python 2 cares less):
try:
# Python 3
from urllib.parse import unquote
unichr = chr
except ImportError:
# Python 2
from urllib import unquote
def unquote_unicode(string, _cache={}):
string = unquote(string) # handle two-digit %hh components first
parts = string.split(u'%u')
if len(parts) == 1:
return parts
r = [parts[0]]
append = r.append
for part in parts[1:]:
try:
digits = part[:4].lower()
if len(digits) < 4:
raise ValueError
ch = _cache.get(digits)
if ch is None:
ch = _cache[digits] = unichr(int(digits, 16))
if (
not r[-1] and
u'\uDC00' <= ch <= u'\uDFFF' and
u'\uD800' <= r[-2] <= u'\uDBFF'
):
# UTF-16 surrogate pair, replace with single non-BMP codepoint
r[-2] = (r[-2] + ch).encode(
'utf-16', 'surrogatepass').decode('utf-16')
else:
append(ch)
append(part[4:])
except ValueError:
append(u'%u')
append(part)
return u''.join(r)
The function is heavily inspired by the current standard-library implementation.
Demo:
>>> print(unquote_unicode('Tan%u0131m'))
Tanım
>>> print(unquote_unicode('%u05D0%u05D9%u05DA%20%u05DE%u05DE%u05D9%u05E8%u05D9%u05DD%20%u05D0%u05EA%20%u05D4%u05D8%u05E7%u05E1%u05D8%20%u05D4%u05D6%u05D4'))
איך ממירים את הטקסט הזה
>>> print(unquote_unicode('%ud83c%udfd6')) # surrogate pair
🏖
>>> print(unquote_unicode('%ufoobar%u666')) # incomplete
%ufoobar%u666
The function works on Python 2 (tested on 2.4 - 2.7) and Python 3 (tested on 3.3 - 3.8).

Easiest way to remove unicode representations from a string in python 3?

I have a string in python 3 that has several unicode representations in it, for example:
t = 'R\\u00f3is\\u00edn'
and I want to convert t so that it has the proper representation when I print it, ie:
>>> print(t)
Róisín
However I just get the original string back. I've tried re.sub and some others, but I can't seem to find a way that will change these characters without having to iterate over each one.
What would be the easiest way to do so?

You want to use the built-in codec unicode_escape.
If t is already a bytes (an 8-bit string), it's as simple as this:
>>> print(t.decode('unicode_escape'))
Róisín
If t has already been decoded to Unicode, you can to encode it back to a bytes and then decode it this way. If you're sure that all of your Unicode characters have been escaped, it actually doesn't matter what codec you use to do the encode. Otherwise, you could try to get your original byte string back, but it's simpler, and probably safer, to just force any non-encoded characters to get encoded, and then they'll get decoded along with the already-encoded ones:
>>> print(t.encode('unicode_escape').decode('unicode_escape')
Róisín
In case you want to know how to do this kind of thing with regular expressions in the future, note that sub lets you pass a function instead of a pattern for the repl. And you can convert any hex string into an integer by calling int(hexstring, 16), and any integer into the corresponding Unicode character with chr (note that this is the one bit that's different in Python 2—you need unichr instead). So:
>>> re.sub(r'(\\u[0-9A-Fa-f]+)', lambda matchobj: chr(int(matchobj.group(0)[2:], 16)), t)
Róisín
Or, making it a bit more clear:
>>> def unescapematch(matchobj):
... escapesequence = matchobj.group(0)
... digits = escapesequence[2:]
... ordinal = int(digits, 16)
... char = chr(ordinal)
... return char
>>> re.sub(r'(\\u[0-9A-Fa-f]+)', unescapematch, t)
Róisín
The unicode_escape codec actually handles \U, \x, \X, octal (\066), and special-character (\n) sequences as well as just \u, and it implements the proper rules for reading only the appropriate max number of digits (4 for \u, 8 for \U, etc., so r'\\u22222' decodes to '∢2' rather than '𢈢'), and probably more things I haven't thought of. But this should give you the idea.

First of all, it is rather confused what you what to convert to.
Just imagine that you may want to convert to 'o' and 'i'. In this case you can just make a map:
mp = {u'\u00f3':'o', u'\u00ed':'i'}
Than you may apply the replacement like:
t = u'R\u00f3is\u00edn'
for i in range(len(t)):
if t[i] in mp: t[i]=mp[t[i]]
print t

I apologize for posting as a second answer, I don't have the reputation to comment on abarnert's solution.
After using his function to process approximately 50K android strings I noticed that there is yet another small improvement possible for certain use-cases.
I changed the + to {1,4} to deal with the case where valid hex characters follow a 4-digit escape.
I also changed int(escapesequence) to read int(digits)
>>> def unescapematch(matchobj):
... escapesequence = matchobj.group(0)
... digits = escapesequence[2:]
... ordinal = int(digits, 16)
... char = unichr(ordinal)
... return char
>>> print re.sub(r'(\\u[0-9A-Fa-f]{1,4})', unescapematch, "Wi\u2011Fi")
Wi‑Fi
>>> print re.sub(r'(\\u[0-9A-Fa-f]+)', unescapematch, "Wi\u2011Fi")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#102>", line 1, in <module>
print re.sub(r'(\\u[0-9A-Fa-f]+)', unescapematch, "Wi\u2011Fi")
File "C:\Python27\lib\re.py", line 151, in sub
return _compile(pattern, flags).sub(repl, string, count)
File "<pyshell#99>", line 5, in unescapematch
char = unichr(ordinal)
ValueError: unichr() arg not in range(0x10000) (narrow Python build)

How do I lowercase a string in Python?

Is there a way to convert a string to lowercase?
"Kilometers" → "kilometers"

Use str.lower():
"Kilometer".lower()

The canonical Pythonic way of doing this is
>>> 'Kilometers'.lower()
'kilometers'
However, if the purpose is to do case insensitive matching, you should use case-folding:
>>> 'Kilometers'.casefold()
'kilometers'
Here's why:
>>> "Maße".casefold()
'masse'
>>> "Maße".lower()
'maße'
>>> "MASSE" == "Maße"
False
>>> "MASSE".lower() == "Maße".lower()
False
>>> "MASSE".casefold() == "Maße".casefold()
True
This is a str method in Python 3, but in Python 2, you'll want to look at the PyICU or py2casefold - several answers address this here.
Unicode Python 3
Python 3 handles plain string literals as unicode:
>>> string = 'Километр'
>>> string
'Километр'
>>> string.lower()
'километр'
Python 2, plain string literals are bytes
In Python 2, the below, pasted into a shell, encodes the literal as a string of bytes, using utf-8.
And lower doesn't map any changes that bytes would be aware of, so we get the same string.
>>> string = 'Километр'
>>> string
'\xd0\x9a\xd0\xb8\xd0\xbb\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb5\xd1\x82\xd1\x80'
>>> string.lower()
'\xd0\x9a\xd0\xb8\xd0\xbb\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb5\xd1\x82\xd1\x80'
>>> print string.lower()
Километр
In scripts, Python will object to non-ascii (as of Python 2.5, and warning in Python 2.4) bytes being in a string with no encoding given, since the intended coding would be ambiguous. For more on that, see the Unicode how-to in the docs and PEP 263
Use Unicode literals, not str literals
So we need a unicode string to handle this conversion, accomplished easily with a unicode string literal, which disambiguates with a u prefix (and note the u prefix also works in Python 3):
>>> unicode_literal = u'Километр'
>>> print(unicode_literal.lower())
километр
Note that the bytes are completely different from the str bytes - the escape character is '\u' followed by the 2-byte width, or 16 bit representation of these unicode letters:
>>> unicode_literal
u'\u041a\u0438\u043b\u043e\u043c\u0435\u0442\u0440'
>>> unicode_literal.lower()
u'\u043a\u0438\u043b\u043e\u043c\u0435\u0442\u0440'
Now if we only have it in the form of a str, we need to convert it to unicode. Python's Unicode type is a universal encoding format that has many advantages relative to most other encodings. We can either use the unicode constructor or str.decode method with the codec to convert the str to unicode:
>>> unicode_from_string = unicode(string, 'utf-8') # "encoding" unicode from string
>>> print(unicode_from_string.lower())
километр
>>> string_to_unicode = string.decode('utf-8')
>>> print(string_to_unicode.lower())
километр
>>> unicode_from_string == string_to_unicode == unicode_literal
True
Both methods convert to the unicode type - and same as the unicode_literal.
Best Practice, use Unicode
It is recommended that you always work with text in Unicode.
Software should only work with Unicode strings internally, converting to a particular encoding on output.
Can encode back when necessary
However, to get the lowercase back in type str, encode the python string to utf-8 again:
>>> print string
Километр
>>> string
'\xd0\x9a\xd0\xb8\xd0\xbb\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb5\xd1\x82\xd1\x80'
>>> string.decode('utf-8')
u'\u041a\u0438\u043b\u043e\u043c\u0435\u0442\u0440'
>>> string.decode('utf-8').lower()
u'\u043a\u0438\u043b\u043e\u043c\u0435\u0442\u0440'
>>> string.decode('utf-8').lower().encode('utf-8')
'\xd0\xba\xd0\xb8\xd0\xbb\xd0\xbe\xd0\xbc\xd0\xb5\xd1\x82\xd1\x80'
>>> print string.decode('utf-8').lower().encode('utf-8')
километр
So in Python 2, Unicode can encode into Python strings, and Python strings can decode into the Unicode type.

With Python 2, this doesn't work for non-English words in UTF-8. In this case decode('utf-8') can help:
>>> s='Километр'
>>> print s.lower()
Километр
>>> print s.decode('utf-8').lower()
километр

Also, you can overwrite some variables:
s = input('UPPER CASE')
lower = s.lower()
If you use like this:
s = "Kilometer"
print(s.lower()) - kilometer
print(s) - Kilometer
It will work just when called.

Don't try this, totally un-recommend, don't do this:
import string
s='ABCD'
print(''.join([string.ascii_lowercase[string.ascii_uppercase.index(i)] for i in s]))
Output:
abcd
Since no one wrote it yet you can use swapcase (so uppercase letters will become lowercase, and vice versa) (and this one you should use in cases where i just mentioned (convert upper to lower, lower to upper)):
s='ABCD'
print(s.swapcase())
Output:
abcd

I would like to provide the summary of all possible methods
.lower() method.
str.lower()
combination of str.translate() and str.maketrans()
.lower() method
original_string = "UPPERCASE"
lowercase_string = original_string.lower()
print(lowercase_string) # Output: "uppercase"
str.lower()
original_string = "UPPERCASE"
lowercase_string = str.lower(original_string)
print(lowercase_string) # Output: "uppercase"
combination of str.translate() and str.maketrans()
original_string = "UPPERCASE"
lowercase_string = original_string.translate(str.maketrans(string.ascii_uppercase, string.ascii_lowercase))
print(lowercase_string) # Output: "uppercase"

lowercasing
This method not only converts all uppercase letters of the Latin alphabet into lowercase ones, but also shows how such logic is implemented. You can test this code in any online Python sandbox.
def turnIntoLowercase(string):
lowercaseCharacters = ''
abc = ['a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h','i','j','k','l','m',
'n','o','p','q','r','s','t','u','v','w','x','y','z',
'A','B','C','D','E','F','G','H','I','J','K','L','M',
'N','O','P','Q','R','S','T','U','V','W','X','Y','Z']
for character in string:
if character not in abc:
lowercaseCharacters += character
elif abc.index(character) <= 25:
lowercaseCharacters += character
else:
lowercaseCharacters += abc[abc.index(character) - 26]
return lowercaseCharacters
string = str(input("Enter your string, please: " ))
print(turnIntoLowercase(string = string))
Performance check
Now, let's enter the following string (and press Enter) to make sure everything works as intended:
# Enter your string, please:
"PYTHON 3.11.2, 15TH FeB 2023"
Result:
"python 3.11.2, 15th feb 2023"

If you want to convert a list of strings to lowercase, you can map str.lower:
list_of_strings = ['CamelCase', 'in', 'Python']
list(map(str.lower, list_of_strings)) # ['camelcase', 'in', 'python']

python - problems with regular expression and unicode

Hi I have a problem in python. I try to explain my problem with an example.
I have this string:
>>> string = 'ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ'
>>> print string
ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ
and i want, for example, replace charachters different from Ñ,Ã,ï with ""
i have tried:
>>> rePat = re.compile('[^ÑÃï]',re.UNICODE)
>>> print rePat.sub("",string)
�Ñ�����������������������������ï�������������������Ã
I obtained this �.
I think that it's happen because this type of characters in python are represented by two position in the vector: for example \xc3\x91 = Ñ.
For this, when i make the regolar expression, all the \xc3 are not substitued. How I can do this type of sub?????
Thanks
Franco

You need to make sure that your strings are unicode strings, not plain strings (plain strings are like byte arrays).
Example:
>>> string = 'ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ'
>>> type(string)
<type 'str'>
# do this instead:
# (note the u in front of the ', this marks the character sequence as a unicode literal)
>>> string = u'\xd0\xd1\xd2\xd3\xd4\xd5\xd6\xd7\xd8\xd9\xda\xdb\xdc\xdd\xde\xdf\xe0\xe1\xe2\xe3\xe4\xe5\xe6\xe7\xe8\xe9\xea\xeb\xec\xed\xee\xef\xf0\xf1\xf2\xf3\xf4\xf5\xf6\xf7\xf8\xf9\xfa\xfb\xfc\xfd\xfe\xff\xc0\xc1\xc2\xc3'
# or:
>>> string = 'ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ'.decode('utf-8')
# ... but be aware that the latter will only work if the terminal (or source file) has utf-8 encoding
# ... it is a best practice to use the \xNN form in unicode literals, as in the first example
>>> type(string)
<type 'unicode'>
>>> print string
ÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øùúûüýþÿÀÁÂÃ
>>> rePat = re.compile(u'[^\xc3\x91\xc3\x83\xc3\xaf]',re.UNICODE)
>>> print rePat.sub("", string)
Ã
When reading from a file, string = open('filename.txt').read() reads a byte sequence.
To get the unicode content, do: string = unicode(open('filename.txt').read(), 'encoding'). Or: string = open('filename.txt').read().decode('encoding').
The codecs module can decode unicode streams (such as files) on-the-fly.
Do a google search for python unicode. Python unicode handling can be a bit hard to grasp at first, it pays to read up on it.
I live by this rule: "Software should only work with Unicode strings internally, converting to a particular encoding on output." (from http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/unicode)
I also recommend: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html