![]() ![]() ![]() In the discussion of ASCII above, you saw that each character maps to an integer in the range 0 through 127. Remove ads Covering All the Bases: Other Number Systems Here are the binary versions of 0 through 10 in decimal: You can also express each of these base-10 numbers with a sequence of bits (base 2). Our ASCII table from the previous section uses what you and I would just call numbers (0 through 127), but what are more precisely called numbers in base 10 (decimal). There are different ways of symbolically representing a bit that all mean the same thing: Now is a good time for a short refresher on the bit, the most fundamental unit of information that a computer knows.Ī bit is a signal that has only two possible states. The subtle difference is because of definition: str.isprintable() considers something printable if “all of its characters are considered printable in repr().” A Bit of a Refresher This disagrees slightly with another method for testing whether a character is considered printable, namely str.isprintable(), which will tell you that none of are considered printable. Note: string.printable includes all of string.whitespace. Characters are segmented into different ranges within the ASCII table: Each single character has a corresponding code point, which you can think of as just an integer. The various categories outlined represent groups of characters. Don’t worry if you’re shaky on the concept of bits, because we’ll get to them shortly. Each character can be encoded to a unique sequence of bits. So what is a more formal definition of a character encoding?Īt a very high level, it’s a way of translating characters (such as letters, punctuation, symbols, whitespace, and control characters) to integers and ultimately to bits. Some non-printable characters: characters such as backspace, "\b", that can’t be printed literally in the way that the letter A can. ![]() ![]() Whitespace characters: an actual space ( " "), as well as a newline, carriage return, horizontal tab, vertical tab, and a few others.Some punctuation and symbols: "$" and "!", to name a couple.ASCII is a good place to start learning about character encoding because it is a small and contained encoding. Whether you’re self-taught or have a formal computer science background, chances are you’ve seen an ASCII table once or twice. The best way to start understanding what they are is to cover one of the simplest character encodings, ASCII. There are tens if not hundreds of character encodings. Be familiar with Python’s built-in functions related to character encodings and numbering systemsĬharacter encoding and numbering systems are so closely connected that they need to be covered in the same tutorial or else the treatment of either would be totally inadequate.įree Download: Get a sample chapter from Python Tricks: The Book that shows you Python’s best practices with simple examples you can apply instantly to write more beautiful Pythonic code.Know about support in Python for numbering systems through its various forms of int literals.Understand how encoding comes into play with Python’s str and bytes.Get conceptual overviews on character encodings and numbering systems.You’ll see how to use concepts of character encodings in live Python code. You’ll still get a language-agnostic primer, but you’ll then dive into illustrations in Python, with text-heavy paragraphs kept to a minimum. This tutorial is different because it’s not language-agnostic but instead deliberately Python-centric. Python’s Unicode support is strong and robust, but it takes some time to master. This tutorial is designed to clear the Exception fog and illustrate that working with text and binary data in Python 3 can be a smooth experience. Places such as Stack Overflow have thousands of questions stemming from confusion over exceptions like UnicodeDecodeError and UnicodeEncodeError. Handling character encodings in Python or any other language can at times seem painful. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Unicode in Python: Working With Character Encodings Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. ![]()
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