Unicode

Read my free ebook: Programming with Unicode!

Encodings

• Windows
  • OEM code page: used by stdin, stdou and stderr in the Windows console
  • ANSI code page: used by all other Windows “ANSI” functions. Some examples: filenames, command line arguments, environment variables, etc.
• UNIX: “Locale encoding”
  • LC_CTYPE locale
  • used for filenames, command line arguments, environment variables, the console (stdin, stdout, stderr)
• Common encodings:
  • UTF-8
  • ISO 8859-1 aka Latin1 or Windows code page 1252
  • ASCII

Python

See my conference (in french) “Comprendre les erreurs Unicode” (Pycon FR 2009 at Paris): slides (PDF) and video.

Narrow and wide builds, PEP 393

Python 3.3 introduced the Flexible String Representation (PEP 393) and supports the whole Unicode range (U+0000 - U+10ffff) on all platforms.

Older Python versions had a “narrow or wide” compilation option:

• UNIX and Mac OS X uses wide mode: the unicode type uses 32-bit code points. In Unicode, it is called the UCS-4 encoding.
• Windows uses narrow mode: the unicode type uses 16-bit code points, non-BMP characters (unicode range U+10000 - U+10ffff) are used as a surrogate pair (two 16-bit code points). In Unicode, it is called the UTF-16 encoding. This mode is preferred on Windows because Windows kernel uses also the UTF-16 encoding internally.

Use sys.maxunicode == 0xffff to check if Python is compiled in narrow mode. Otherwise, sys.maxunicode is equal to 0x10ffff.

Python 2

• str type and "abc" are strings of bytes, unicode type is a string of characters
• “Default encoding”
  • sys.getdefaultencoding()
  • used by unicode.encode() and str.decode() when no encoding is specified
  • ASCII by default, must not by modified (sys.setdefaultencoding())
• File system encoding
  • sys.getfilesystemencoding()
  • used to encode filenames and environment variables
  • used on UNIX by os.listdir(unicode) to decode filenames
  • ANSI code page (mbcs) on Windows, utf-8 on Mac OS X, the locale encoding on UNIX
• Locale encoding
  • locale.getpreferredencoding()
  • used by default by io.TextIOWrapper
  • ANSI code page on Windows, LC_CTYPE locale on UNIX
• OEM code page (Windows only)
  • sys.stdin.encoding, sys.stdout.encoding and sys.stderr.encoding

Python 3

• bytes type is a string of bytes, str type and "abc" are strings of characters
• UTF-8
  • used for the default encoding of the source code
• “Locale encoding”
  • locale.getpreferredencoding()
  • ANSI code page on Windows, LC_CTYPE locale on UNIX
  • used by sys.stdin, sys.stdout, sys.stderr, and by default by open() (and io.TextIOWrapper)
• “File system encoding”
  • sys.getfilesystemencoding()
  • ANSI code page (mbcs) on Windows, utf-8 on Mac OS X, the locale encoding on UNIX
  • used for filenames, command line arguments, environment variables
• “Default encoding”
  • sys.getdefaultencoding(), hardcoded to utf-8
  • used by bytes.decode() and str.encode() when no encoding is specified
• OEM code page (Windows only)
  • sys.stdin.encoding, sys.stdout.encoding and sys.stderr.encoding

Issues

• GB2312 codec is using a wrong covert table: WONTFIX, It’s a bug, but one which is present in a lot of other systems as well, so we’d potentially make it impossible to write GB2312 data which is supposed to be read back by these other systems.

Test non-ASCII characters with locales

It seems like FreeBSD 11 doesn’t support all encodings: only Latin1 and UTF-8 seem to be implemented. At least, KOI8-R, Big5 and CP1131 are not implemented properly.

Windows locales: “fr-FR”, “en-US”, “ja-JP”, etc.

On Windows, before setlocale(LC_CTYPE, “”) is called, LC_CTYPE uses the Latin1 encoding in practice (see Python issue #29571). Call setlocale(LC_CTYPE, “”) to use the ANSI code page.

My tools:

• test_all_locales.py: test Python implementation of locales. Only support a few operating systems.
• all_locales.py: script to list all working locales, can be different than “locale -a”
• c_locale.c: basic info on the “C” locale

Use cases

• Latin1 or UTF-8 encoding (locale different than C and POSIX)
• C or POSIX locale: ASCII encoding on Linux, Latin1 encoding on FreeBSD/Solaris (but ASCII announced by nl_langinfo(CODESET))
• LC_NUMERIC != LC_CTYPE: the fun localeconv() bug, https://bugs.python.org/issue31900
• python 3.7 -X utf8
• macOS and Android UTF-8

Locale, announced encoding, effective encoding

Inconsistent:

Operating system	Locale	Announced encoding	Effective encoding
FreeBSD	C, POSIX	US-ASCII	ISO-8859-1
FreeBSD	zh_TW.Big5	Big5	? (not Big5)
macOS	C, POSIX	US-ASCII	ISO-8859-1
macOS	zh_TW.Big5	Big5	? (not Big5)

Consistent, announced encoding = effective encoding:

Operating system	Locale	Encoding
Fedora 27	C, POSIX	ASCII
FreeBSD	fr_FR.UTF-8	UTF-8
macOS	fr_FR.UTF-8	UTF-8
Fedora 27	fr_FR.UTF-8	UTF-8
Fedora 27	zh_TW.Big5	Big5

Tested operating systems:

• macOS 10.13.2:
• FreeBSD 11.1
• Fedora 27 (glibc 2.26)

localeconv()

Fedora 27:

LC_ALL locale	Encoding	Field	Bytes	Text
es_MX.utf8	UTF-8	thousands_sep	0xE2 0x80 0x89	U+2009
fr_FR.UTF-8	UTF-8	currency_symbol	0xE2 0x82 0xAC	U+20AC (€)
ps_AF.utf8	UTF-8	thousands_sep	0xD9 0xAC	U+066C (٬)
uk_UA.koi8u	KOI8-U	currency_symbol	0xC7 0xD2 0xCE 0x2E	U+0433 U+0440 U+043d U+002E (грн.)
uk_UA.koi8u	KOI8-U	thousands_sep	0x9A	U+00A0

macOS 10.13.2:

LC_ALL locale	Encoding	Field	Bytes	Text
ru_RU.ISO8859-5	ISO8859-5	currency_symbol	b'\xe0\xe3\xd1.'	U+0440 U+0443 U+0431 U+002e (руб.)

FreeBSD 11:

LC_ALL locale	Encoding	Field	Bytes	Text
ar_SA.UTF-8	UTF-8	decimal_point	b'\xd9\xab'	U+066b (’٫’)
ar_SA.UTF-8	UTF-8	thousands_sep	b'\xd9\xac'	U+066c (’٬’)
ar_SA.UTF-8	UTF-8	currency_symbol	b'\xd8\xb1.\xd8\xb3.\xe2\x80\x8f'	U+0631 U+002e U+0633 U+002e U+200f (‘ر.س.u200f’)
zh_TW.Big5	Big5	currency_symbol	b'\xa2\xdc\xa2\xe2\xa2\x43'	u'\uff2e\uff34\uff04' (ＮＴ＄)
zh_TW.Big5	Big5	decimal_point	b'\xa1\x44'	u'\uff0e' (．)
zh_TW.Big5	Big5	thousands_sep	b'\xa1\x41'	u'\uff0c' (，)

Note: On FreeBSD with LC_CTYPE=”zh_TW.Big5”, mbstowcs() doesn’t use Big5 but a different encoding and so returns mojibake.

Windows 7.1:

LC_ALL locale	Encoding	Field	Bytes	Text
fr-FR	cp1252	currency_symbol	b'\x80'	U+20AC
fr-FR	cp1252	thousands_sep	b'\xA0'	U+00A0

strftime(), tzname

Fedora 27:

LC_ALL locale	Encoding	Month %b	Bytes	Text
fr_FR	Latin1	December	b'd\xe9c.'	'd\xe9c.' (déc.)

Windows 8.1:

LC_ALL locale	Encoding	Date, format	Bytes	Text
fr-FR	cp1252	December, %b	b'd\xe9c.'	'd\xe9c.' (déc.)
ja-JP	cp932?	Monday, %a	N/A	'\u6708'

Python2:

vstinner@apu$ python2
>>> import time, locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "fr_FR")
'fr_FR'
>>> time.strftime("%A, %d %B %Y", time.localtime(time.mktime((2018, 2, 1, 12, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0))))
'jeudi, 01 f\xe9vrier 2018'

• non-ASCII tzname on Windows: “‘東京 (標準時)’ means ‘Tokyo (Standard Time)’ in Japanese.”
• https://bugs.python.org/issue5905
• https://bugs.python.org/issue13560
• https://bugs.python.org/issue16322
• Commit af02e1c8: Add PyUnicode_DecodeLocaleAndSize() and PyUnicode_DecodeLocale() “Fix time.strftime() (if wcsftime() is missing): decode strftime() result from the current locale encoding, not from the filesystem encoding.”
• Commit 720f34a3: Issue #5905: “time.strftime() is now using the locale encoding, instead of UTF-8, if the wcsftime() function is not available.”

strerror()

LC_ALL locale	Encoding	Bytes	Text
fr_FR.ISO8859-1	ISO-8859-1	b'Fichier ou r\xe9pertoire inexistant'	'Fichier ou r\xe9pertoire inexistant'

Links:

• non-ASCII strerror: “os.strerror(23) = ‘Trop de fichiers ouverts dans le syst\xe8me’.”
• https://bugs.python.org/issue13560
• Commit 1f33f2b0: “Issue #13560: os.strerror() now uses the current locale encoding instead of UTF-8”

Political and regional differences

Unicode provides a single standard and so cannot have special cases depending on country or recent political changes. Examples:

• 2018: lower() on Turkish letter “İ” returns a 2-chars-long string
• 2017: Germany made the upper case ß official. ‘ß’.upper() should now return ẞ.