I am working on IIB10 right now, and we have a problem with candidate's names sometimes which contain accented/Unicode characters which need to be replaced with its equivalent ASCII character either in ESQL or Java. The input parser in XMLNC.
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Currently it seems that in order for UTF-8 characters to display in a portal message you need to decode them first.
Here is a snippet from my code:
self.context.plone_utils.addPortalMessage(_(u'This document (%s) has already been uploaded.' % (doc_obj.Title().decode('utf-8'))))
If Titles in Plone are already UTF-8 encoded, the string is a unicode string and the underscore function is handled by i18ndude, I do not see a reason why we specifically need to decode utf-8. Usually I forget to add it and remember once I get a UnicodeError.
Any thoughts? Is this the expected behavior of addPortalMessage? Is it i18ndude that is causing the issue?
UTF-8 is a representation of Unicode, not Unicode and not a Python unicode string. In Python, we convert back and forth between Python's unicode strings and representations of unicode via encode/decode.
Decoding a UTF-8 string via utf8string.decode('utf-8') produces a Python unicode string that may be concatenated with other unicode strings.
Python will automatically convert a string to unicode if it needs to by using the ASCII decoder. That will fail if there are non-ASCII characters in the string -- because, for example, it is encoded in UTF-8.
A little encoding puzzle for you.
A comment on a SourceForge tracker item contains the character U+2014, EM DASH, which is rendered by the web interface as — like it should.
In the XML export, however, it shows up as:
—
Decoding the entities, that results in these code points:
U+00E2 U+20AC U+201D
I.e. the characters —. The XML should have been —, the decimal representation of 0x2014, so this is probably a bug in the SF.net exporter.
Now I'm looking to reverse the process, but I can't find a way to get the above output from this Unicode character, no matter what erroneous encoding/decoding sequence I try. Any idea what happened here and how to reverse the process?
The the XML output is incorrectly been encoded using CP1252. To revert this, convert — to bytes using CP1252 encoding and then convert those bytes back to string/char using UTF-8 encoding.
Java based evidence:
String s = "—";
System.out.println(new String(s.getBytes("CP1252"), "UTF-8")); // —
Note that this assumes that the stdout console uses by itself UTF-8 to display the character.
In .Net, Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Encoding.GetEncoding(1252).GetBytes("—")) returns —.
SourceForge converted it to UTF8, interpreted the each of the bytes as characters in CP1252, then saved the characters as three separate entities using the actual Unicode codepoints for those characters.
I am interested in theory on whether Encoding is the same as Escaping? According to Wikipedia
an escape character is a character
which invokes an alternative
interpretation on subsequent
characters in a character sequence.
My current thought is that they are different. Escaping is when you place an escape charater in front of a metacharacter(s) to mark it/them as to behave differently than what they would have normally.
Encoding, on the other hand, is all about transforming data into another form, and upon wanting to read the original content it is decoded back to its original form.
Escaping is a subset of encoding: You only encode certain characters by prefixing a special character instead of transferring (typically all or many) characters to another representation.
Escaping examples:
In an SQL statement: ... WHERE name='O\' Reilly'
In the shell: ls Thirty\ Seconds\ *
Many programming languages: "\"Test\" string (or """Test""")
Encoding examples:
Replacing < with < when outputting user input in HTML
The character encoding, like UTF-8
Using sequences that do not include the desired character, like \u0061 for a
They're different, and I think you're getting the distinction correctly.
Encoding is when you transform between a logical representation of a text ("logical string", e.g. Unicode) into a well-defined sequence of binary digits ("physical string", e.g. ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16). Escaping is a special character (typically the backslash: '\') which initiates a different interpretation of the character(s) following the escape character; escaping is necessary when you need to encode a larger number of symbols to a smaller number of distinct (and finite) bit sequences.
They are indeed different.
You pretty much got it right.
I have a Perl script that takes text values from a MySQL table and writes it to a text file. The problem is, when I open the text file for viewing I am getting a lot of hex characters like \x92 and \x93 which stands for single and double quotes, I guess.
I am using DBI->quote function to escape the special chars before writing the values to the text file. I have tried using Encode::Encoder, but with no luck. The character set on both the tables is latin1.
How do I get rid of those hex characters and get the character to show in the text file?
ISO Latin-1 does not define characters in the range 0x80 to 0x9f, so displaying these bytes in hex is expected. Most likely your data is actually encoded in Windows-1252, which is the same as Latin1 except that it defines additional characters (including left/right quotes) in this range.
\x92 and \x93 are empty characters in the latin1 character set (see here or here). If you are certain that you are indeed dealing with latin1, you can simply delete them.
It sounds like you need to change the character sets on the tables, or translate the non-latin-1 characters into latin-1 equivalents. I'd prefer the first solution. Get used to Unicode; you're going to have to learn it at some point. :)
I have a Perl script that is being called by third parties to send me names of people who have registered my software. One of these parties encodes the names in UTF-8, so I have adapted my script accordingly to decode UTF-8 to ASCII with Encode::decode_utf8(...).
This usually works fine, but every 6 months or so one of the names contains cyrillic, greek or romanian characters, so decoding the name results in garbage characters such as "ПодражанÑкаÑ". I have to follow-up with the customer and ask him for a "latin character version" of his name in order to issue a registration code.
So, is there any Perl module that can detect whether there are such characters and automatically translates them to their closest ASCII representation if necessary?
It seems that I can use Lingua::Cyrillic::Translit::ICAO plus Lingua::DetectCharset to handle Cyrillic, but I would prefer something that works with other character sets as well.
I believe you could use Text::Unidecode for this, it is precisely what it tries to do.
In the documentation for Text::Unicode, under "Caveats", it appears that this phrase is incorrect:
Make sure that the input data really is a utf8 string.
UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding, whereas Text::Unidecode only accepts a fixed-length (two-byte) encoding for each character. So that sentence should read:
Make sure that the input data really is a string of two-byte Unicode characters.
This is also referred to as UCS-2.
If you want to convert strings which really are utf8, you would do it like so:
my $decode_status = utf8::decode($input_to_be_converted);
my $converted_string = unidecode ($input_to_be_converted);
If you have to deal with UTF-8 data that are not in the ascii range, your best bet is to change your backend so it doesn't choke on utf-8. How would you go about transliterating kanji signs?
If you get cyrilic text there is no "closest ASCII representation" for many characters.