look at that:
import urllib
print urllib.urlencode(dict(bla='Ã'))
the output is
bla=%C3%BC
what I want is simple, I want the output in ascii instead of utf-8, so I need the output:
bla=%C3
if I try:
urllib.urlencode(dict(bla='Ã'.decode('iso-8859-1')))
doesn't work (all my python files are utf-8 encoded):
'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(128)
In production, the input comes unicoded.
Have a look at unicode transliteration in python:
from unidecode import unidecode
print unidecode(u"\u5317\u4EB0")
# That prints: Bei Jing
In your case:
bla='Ã'
print unidecode(bla)
'A'
This is a third party library, which can be easily installed via:
$ git clone http://code.zemanta.com/tsolc/git/unidecode
$ cd unidecode
$ python setup.py install
I want the output in ascii instead of utf-8
That's not ASCII, which has no characters mapped above 0x80. You're talking about ISO-8859-1, or possibly code page 1252 (the Windows encoding based on it).
'Ã'.decode('iso-8859-1')
Well that depends on what encoding you've used to save the character Ã
in the source, doesn't it? It sounds like your text editor has saved it as UTF-8. (That's a good thing, because locale-specific encodings like ISO-8859-1 need to go away ASAP.)
Tell Python that the source file you've saved is in UTF-8 as per PEP 263:
# coding=utf-8
urllib.quote(u'Ã'.encode('iso-8859-1')) # -> %C3
Or, if you don't want that hassle, use a backslash escape:
urllib.quote(u'\u00C3'.encode('iso-8859-1')) # -> %C3
Although, either way, a modern webapp should be using UTF-8 for its input rather than ISO-8859-1/cp1252.
pretty well working asciification is this way:
import unicodedata
unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', 'Ã'.decode('UTF-8')).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
If your input is actually UTF-8 and you want iso-8859-1 as output (which is not ASCII) what you need is:
'ñ'.decode('utf-8').encode('iso-8859-1')
thanks to all solutions. all of you converge to the very same point.
I made a mess changing the right code
.encode('iso-8859-1')
to
.decode('iso-8859-1')
turn back to .encode('iso-8859-1') and it works.
Package unihandecode
is
US-ASCII transliterations of Unicode text.
an improved version of Python unidecode, that is Python port of Text::Unidecode Perl module by Sean M. Burke .
pip install Unihandecode
then in python
import unihandecode
print(unihandecode.unidecode(u'Ã'))
prints A
.