Re: problem with unicode

[John Machin]

On Apr 25, 9:15 pm, "[e-mail]"
<[e-mail]:

Hi everybody,

I'm using the win32 console and have the following short program
excerpt

# media is a binary string (mysql escaped zipped file)

print media

x$B%o%f%m(B[$B%h(B ...
(works)

print unicode(media)

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x9c in position
1: ordinal not in range(128)
(ok i guess print assumes you want to print to ascii)

Guessing is no substitute for reading the manual.

print has nothing to do with your problem; the problem is
unicode(media) -- as you specified no encoding, it uses the default
encoding, which is ascii [unless you have been mucking about, which is
not recommended]. As the 2nd byte is 0x9c, ascii is going nowhere.

>

print unicode(media).encode('utf-8')

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x9c in position
1: ordinal not in range(128)
(why does this not work?)

Already unicode(media) "doesn't work", so naturally(?)
unicode(media).whatever() won't be better -- whatever won't be called.

>
# mapString is a unicode string (i think at least)>print "'" + mapString + "'"

' yu_200703_hello\ 831 v1234.9874 '

mystr = "%s %s" % (mapString, media)

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x9c in position
1: ordinal not in range(128)

mystr = "%s %s" % (mapString.encode('utf-8'), media.encode('utf-8'))

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x9c in position
1: ordinal not in range(128)

This is merely repeating the original problem.

>
I don't know what to do. I just want to concatenate two string where
apparently one is a binary string, the other one is a unicode string
and I always seem to get this error.

Any help is appreciated :)

We need a clue or two; do this and let us know what it says:

print type(media), repr(media)
print type(mapString), repr(mapString)
import sys; print sys.stdout.encoding

Also you say that "print media" works. Do you mean that it produces
some meaningful text that you understand? What I see on the screen in
Google Groups is the following 6 characters:
LATIN SMALL LETTER X
KATAKANA LETTER WA
KATAKANA LETTER YU
KATAKANA LETTER RO
LEFT SQUARE BRACKET
KATAKANA LETTER YO
Is that what you see?

What is it that you call "win32 console"?