Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By : Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham
Book Image

The Python Apprentice

By: Robert Smallshire, Austin Bingham

Overview of this book

Experienced programmers want to know how to enhance their craft and we want to help them start as apprentices with Python. We know that before mastering Python you need to learn the culture and the tools to become a productive member of any Python project. Our goal with this book is to give you a practical and thorough introduction to Python programming, providing you with the insight and technical craftsmanship you need to be a productive member of any Python project. Python is a big language, and it’s not our intention with this book to cover everything there is to know. We just want to make sure that you, as the developer, know the tools, basic idioms and of course the ins and outs of the language, the standard library and other modules to be able to jump into most projects.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
12
Afterword – Just the Beginning

Strings with Unicode


Strings are fully Unicode capable, so you can use them with international characters easily, even in literals, because the default source code encoding for Python 3 is UTF-8. For example, if you have access to Norwegian characters, you can simply enter this:

>>> "Vi er så glad for å høre og lære om Python!"
'Vi er så glad for å høre og lære om Python!'

Alternatively, you can use the hexadecimal representations of Unicode code points as an escape sequence prefixed by \u:

>>> "Vi er s\u00e5 glad for \u00e5 h\xf8re og l\u00e6re om Python!"
'Vi er så glad for å høre og lære om Python!'

We're sure you'll agree, though, that this is somewhat more unwieldy.

Similarly, you can use the \x escape sequence followed by a 2-character hexadecimal string to include one-byte Unicode code points in a string literal:

>>> '\xe5'
'å'

You can even an use an escaped octal string using a single backlash followed by three digits in the range zero to seven, although we confess...