Question about string.printabl e and non-printable characters

[Daniel Alexandre]

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Hi there,

I'm using the following method in my program to check whether a message
received is printable or not and to strip the non-printable characters:

CheckPrintable( self,message):
printablemessag e = ""
for char in message:
if char in string.printabl e: printablemessag e = printablemessag e +
char
return printablemessag e

The method is working fine, except in one detail, it's also stripping
the accented letters which I didn't want to happen. Is there a
string.printabl e declaration which contains accented letters? Thanks in
advance. If you can, please reply to my email.
- --
Best Regards,
Daniel Alexandre ( df****@student. dei.uc.pt )
PGP Public Key: http://student.dei.uc.pt/~dfcruz/pubring.html
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[Michael Hoffman]

Daniel Alexandre wrote:

CheckPrintable( self,message):
printablemessag e = ""
for char in message:
if char in string.printabl e: printablemessag e = printablemessag e
+ char
return printablemessag e

That would probably be best written (using Python 2.4) as:

def check_printable (self, message, printable=strin g.printable):
return "".join(cha r for char in message if char in printable)

It would be much more efficient for one thing. And you can change printable to
be whatever you want. Unfortunately, no one knows what letters you want to
define as printable other than you, or what is printable on your codeset.
string.printabl e is a least-common denominator ASCII set. You can certainly
make it string.printabl e + "aeioun" (replacing the ASCII letters with their
accented versions in your codeset of course).

Of course I might be proven totally wrong when the i18n heavies weigh in ;)
--
Michael Hoffman

[Sibylle Koczian]

Michael Hoffman schrieb:

string.printabl e is a least-common denominator ASCII set. You can certainly
make it string.printabl e + "aeioun" (replacing the ASCII letters with their
accented versions in your codeset of course).

There is something I don't understand about string.printabl e: on the one
hand the library reference says "This is a combination of digits,
letters, punctuation, and whitespace." The value of string.letters is
locale-dependent, so string.printabl e should change as well after
calling locale.setlocal e(). But it doesn't.

But you could always call locale.setlocal e() and afterwards combine your
"printable" string yourself.

--
Dr. Sibylle Koczian
Universitaetsbi bliothek, Abt. Naturwiss.
D-86135 Augsburg

Tel.: [phone], Fax : [phone]
e-mail : Si************* @Bibliothek.Uni-Augsburg.DE