compare unicode to non-unicode strings

[Asterix]

how could I test that those 2 strings are the same:

'séd' (repr is 's\\xc3\\xa9d')

u'séd' (repr is u's\\xe9d')

[John Machin]

[note: your reprs are wrong; change the \\ to \]

You need to decode the non-unicode string and compare the result with
the unicode string. You need to know the encoding used for the non-
unicode string. In the example that you gave, it's about 99.99% likely
that it's UTF-8.

>>> 's\xc3\xa9d'.decode('utf8')
u's\xe9d'
>>> u's\xe9d'.encode('utf8')
's\xc3\xa9d'
>>>

HTH,
John

[Fredrik Lundh]

Asterix wrote:

determine what encoding the former string is using (looks like UTF-8),
and convert it to Unicode before doing the comparision.

>>> b = 's\xc3\xa9d'
>>> u = u's\xe9d'
>>> b
's\xc3\xa9d'
>>> u
u's\xe9d'
>>> unicode(b, "utf-8")
u's\xe9d'
>>> unicode(b, "utf-8") == u
True

</F>

[Méta-MCI (MVP)]

Par Toutatis !
Si tu avais posé la question à Ordralphabétix, ou sur un des ng français
consacrés à Python, au lieu de refaire "La grande Traversée", la réponse
aurait peut-être été plus rapide.

@-salutations
--
Michel Claveau

[Matt Nordhoff]

You may also want to look at unicodedata.normalize(). For example, é can
be represented multiple ways:

>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.normalize('NFC', u'é')
u'\xe9'
>>> unicodedata.normalize('NFD', u'é')
u'e\u0301'
>>> u'\xe9' == u'e\u0301'
False

The first form is "composed", just being U+00E9 (LATIN SMALL LETTER E
WITH ACUTE). The second form is "decomposed", being made up of U+0065
(LATIN SMALL LETTER E) and U+0301 (COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT).

Even though they represent the same thing to a human, they don't compare
as equal. But if you normalize them to the same form, they will.

For more information, look at the unicodedata module's documentation:
<http://docs.python.org/lib/module-unicodedata.html>
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