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a simple unicode question

Mark Tolonen metolone+gmane at gmail.com
Wed Oct 21 02:15:45 EDT 2009 
"George Trojan" <george.trojan at noaa.gov> wrote in message 
news:hbktk6$8bn$1 at news.nems.noaa.gov...
Thanks for all suggestions. It took me a while to find out how to
configure my keyboard to be able to type the degree sign. I prefer to
stick with pure ASCII if possible.
Where are the literals (i.e. u'\N{DEGREE SIGN}') defined? I found
http://www.unicode.org/Public/5.1.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt
Is that the place to look?

George

Scott David Daniels wrote:
> Mark Tolonen wrote:
>>> Is there a better way of getting the degrees?
>>
>> It seems your string is UTF-8.  \xc2\xb0 is UTF-8 for DEGREE SIGN.  If 
>> you type non-ASCII characters in source code, make sure to declare the 
>> encoding the file is *actually* saved in:
>>
>> # coding: utf-8
>>
>> s = '''48° 13' 16.80" N'''
>> q = s.decode('utf-8')
>>
>> # next line equivalent to previous two
>> q = u'''48° 13' 16.80" N'''
>>
>> # couple ways to find the degrees
>> print int(q[:q.find(u'°')])
>> import re
>> print re.search(ur'(\d+)°',q).group(1)
>>
>
> Mark is right about the source, but you needn't write unicode source
> to process unicode data.  Since nobody else mentioned my favorite way
> of writing unicode in ASCII, try:
>
> IDLE 2.6.3
>  >>> s = '''48\xc2\xb0 13' 16.80" N'''
>  >>> q = s.decode('utf-8')
>  >>> degrees, rest = q.split(u'\N{DEGREE SIGN}')
>  >>> print degrees
> 48
>  >>> print rest
>  13' 16.80" N
>
> And if you are unsure of the name to use:
>  >>> import unicodedata
>  >>> unicodedata.name(u'\xb0')
> 'DEGREE SIGN'

It wouldn't be your favorite way if you were typing Chinese:

x = u'我是美国人。'

vs.

x = u'\N{CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-6211}\N{CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-662F}\N{CJK 
UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-7F8E}\N{CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-56FD}\N{CJK UNIFIED 
IDEOGRAPH-4EBA}\N{IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP}'

;^) Mark
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