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char 128? no... 256

Afanasiy abelikov72 at hotmail.com
Wed Feb 12 13:29:21 EST 2003 
On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 10:44:18 -0600, Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote:

>
>    >> To clarify, the TradeMark symbol is being transformed to Unicode
>    >> #8482 automatically, presumably by COM or ADO. In Python, I do not
>    >> know how I am supposed to be able to print (for example) the Unicode
>    >> object I receive which contains this transformed TradeMark symbol.
>
>Print it where?  To a file or a display device?  Remember, display devices
>need to know the encoding of the data they receive as well.  For example, it
>does me no good to print utf-8 encoded characters in an xterm, since it only
>understands iso-8859-1.  On the other hand, I can set the charset of my
>Mac's Terminal app windows to utf-8 and display all sorts of cool stuff.  In
>this case, it appears the trademark sign is not available in iso-8859-1:
>
>    >>> tm = u"\N{TRADE MARK SIGN}"
>    >>> tm
>    u'\u2122'
>    >>> tm.encode("latin-1")
>    Traceback (most recent call last):
>      File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
>    UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u2122' in position 0: ordinal not in range(256)
>    >>> tm.encode("utf-8")
>    '\xe2\x84\xa2'
>
>so you're scrod unless you can find an encoding your display device knows
>about which contains a trade mark sign.
>
>Skip


All of my devices can display the TradeMark symbol correctly.
None of them can print the Unicode character 8482. I never use Unicode.
The TradeMark symbol is being encoded to that Unicode value, 8482.
I would like to decode that back to what I assume is iso-8859-1.
However, encoding back to iso-8859-1 only allows characters under 256.
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