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Unicode HOWTO
================
**Version 1.02**
This HOWTO discusses Python's support for Unicode, and explains various
problems that people commonly encounter when trying to work with Unicode.
Introduction to Unicode
------------------------------
History of Character Codes
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
In 1968, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange,
better known by its acronym ASCII, was standardized. ASCII defined
numeric codes for various characters, with the numeric values running from 0 to
127. For example, the lowercase letter 'a' is assigned 97 as its code
value.
ASCII was an American-developed standard, so it only defined
unaccented characters. There was an 'e', but no 'é' or 'Í'. This
meant that languages which required accented characters couldn't be
faithfully represented in ASCII. (Actually the missing accents matter
for English, too, which contains words such as 'naïve' and 'café', and some
publications have house styles which require spellings such as
'coöperate'.)
For a while people just wrote programs that didn't display accents. I
remember looking at Apple ][ BASIC programs, published in French-language
publications in the mid-1980s, that had lines like these::
PRINT "FICHER EST COMPLETE."
PRINT "CARACTERE NON ACCEPTE."
Those messages should contain accents, and they just look wrong to
someone who can read French.
In the 1980s, almost all personal computers were 8-bit, meaning that
bytes could hold values ranging from 0 to 255. ASCII codes only went
up to 127, so some machines assigned values between 128 and 255 to
accented characters. Different machines had different codes, however,
which led to problems exchanging files. Eventually various commonly
used sets of values for the 128-255 range emerged. Some were true
standards, defined by the International Standards Organization, and
some were **de facto** conventions that were invented by one company
or another and managed to catch on.
255 characters aren't very many. For example, you can't fit
both the accented characters used in Western Europe and the Cyrillic
alphabet used for Russian into the 128-255 range because there are more than
127 such characters.
You could write files using different codes (all your Russian
files in a coding system called KOI8, all your French files in
a different coding system called Latin1), but what if you wanted
to write a French document that quotes some Russian text? In the
1980s people began to want to solve this problem, and the Unicode
standardization effort began.
Unicode started out using 16-bit characters instead of 8-bit characters. 16
bits means you have 2^16 = 65,536 distinct values available, making it
possible to represent many different characters from many different
alphabets; an initial goal was to have Unicode contain the alphabets for
every single human language. It turns out that even 16 bits isn't enough to
meet that goal, and the modern Unicode specification uses a wider range of
codes, 0-1,114,111 (0x10ffff in base-16).
There's a related ISO standard, ISO 10646. Unicode and ISO 10646 were
originally separate efforts, but the specifications were merged with
the 1.1 revision of Unicode.
(This discussion of Unicode's history is highly simplified. I don't
think the average Python programmer needs to worry about the
historical details; consult the Unicode consortium site listed in the
References for more information.)
Definitions
''''''''''''''''''''''''
A **character** is the smallest possible component of a text. 'A',
'B', 'C', etc., are all different characters. So are 'È' and
'Í'. Characters are abstractions, and vary depending on the
language or context you're talking about. For example, the symbol for
ohms (Ω) is usually drawn much like the capital letter
omega (Ω) in the Greek alphabet (they may even be the same in
some fonts), but these are two different characters that have
different meanings.
The Unicode standard describes how characters are represented by
**code points**. A code point is an integer value, usually denoted in
base 16. In the standard, a code point is written using the notation
U+12ca to mean the character with value 0x12ca (4810 decimal). The
Unicode standard contains a lot of tables listing characters and their
corresponding code points::
0061 'a'; LATIN SMALL LETTER A
0062 'b'; LATIN SMALL LETTER B
0063 'c'; LATIN SMALL LETTER C
...
007B '{'; LEFT CURLY BRACKET
Strictly, these definitions imply that it's meaningless to say 'this is
character U+12ca'. U+12ca is a code point, which represents some particular
character; in this case, it represents the character 'ETHIOPIC SYLLABLE WI'.
In informal contexts, this distinction between code points and characters will
sometimes be forgotten.
A character is represented on a screen or on paper by a set of graphical
elements that's called a **glyph**. The glyph for an uppercase A, for
example, is two diagonal strokes and a horizontal stroke, though the exact
details will depend on the font being used. Most Python code doesn't need
to worry about glyphs; figuring out the correct glyph to display is
generally the job of a GUI toolkit or a terminal's font renderer.
Encodings
'''''''''
To summarize the previous section:
a Unicode string is a sequence of code points, which are
numbers from 0 to 0x10ffff. This sequence needs to be represented as
a set of bytes (meaning, values from 0-255) in memory. The rules for
translating a Unicode string into a sequence of bytes are called an
**encoding**.
The first encoding you might think of is an array of 32-bit integers.
In this representation, the string "Python" would look like this::
P y t h o n
0x50 00 00 00 79 00 00 00 74 00 00 00 68 00 00 00 6f 00 00 00 6e 00 00 00
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
This representation is straightforward but using
it presents a number of problems.
1. It's not portable; different processors order the bytes
differently.
2. It's very wasteful of space. In most texts, the majority of the code
points are less than 127, or less than 255, so a lot of space is occupied
by zero bytes. The above string takes 24 bytes compared to the 6
bytes needed for an ASCII representation. Increased RAM usage doesn't
matter too much (desktop computers have megabytes of RAM, and strings
aren't usually that large), but expanding our usage of disk and
network bandwidth by a factor of 4 is intolerable.
3. It's not compatible with existing C functions such as ``strlen()``,
so a new family of wide string functions would need to be used.
4. Many Internet standards are defined in terms of textual data, and
can't handle content with embedded zero bytes.
Generally people don't use this encoding, choosing other encodings
that are more efficient and convenient.
Encodings don't have to handle every possible Unicode character, and
most encodings don't. For example, Python's default encoding is the
'ascii' encoding. The rules for converting a Unicode string into the
ASCII encoding are simple; for each code point:
1. If the code point is <128, each byte is the same as the value of the
code point.
2. If the code point is 128 or greater, the Unicode string can't
be represented in this encoding. (Python raises a
``UnicodeEncodeError`` exception in this case.)
Latin-1, also known as ISO-8859-1, is a similar encoding. Unicode
code points 0-255 are identical to the Latin-1 values, so converting
to this encoding simply requires converting code points to byte
values; if a code point larger than 255 is encountered, the string
can't be encoded into Latin-1.
Encodings don't have to be simple one-to-one mappings like Latin-1.
Consider IBM's EBCDIC, which was used on IBM mainframes. Letter
values weren't in one block: 'a' through 'i' had values from 129 to
137, but 'j' through 'r' were 145 through 153. If you wanted to use
EBCDIC as an encoding, you'd probably use some sort of lookup table to
perform the conversion, but this is largely an internal detail.
UTF-8 is one of the most commonly used encodings. UTF stands for
"Unicode Transformation Format", and the '8' means that 8-bit numbers
are used in the encoding. (There's also a UTF-16 encoding, but it's
less frequently used than UTF-8.) UTF-8 uses the following rules:
1. If the code point is <128, it's represented by the corresponding byte value.
2. If the code point is between 128 and 0x7ff, it's turned into two byte values
between 128 and 255.
3. Code points >0x7ff are turned into three- or four-byte sequences, where
each byte of the sequence is between 128 and 255.
UTF-8 has several convenient properties:
1. It can handle any Unicode code point.
2. A Unicode string is turned into a string of bytes containing no embedded zero bytes. This avoids byte-ordering issues, and means UTF-8 strings can be processed by C functions such as ``strcpy()`` and sent through protocols that can't handle zero bytes.
3. A string of ASCII text is also valid UTF-8 text.
4. UTF-8 is fairly compact; the majority of code points are turned into two bytes, and values less than 128 occupy only a single byte.
5. If bytes are corrupted or lost, it's possible to determine the start of the next UTF-8-encoded code point and resynchronize. It's also unlikely that random 8-bit data will look like valid UTF-8.
References
''''''''''''''
The Unicode Consortium site at <http://www.unicode.org> has character
charts, a glossary, and PDF versions of the Unicode specification. Be
prepared for some difficult reading.
<http://www.unicode.org/history/> is a chronology of the origin and
development of Unicode.
To help understand the standard, Jukka Korpela has written an
introductory guide to reading the Unicode character tables,
available at <http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/unicode/guide.html>.
Roman Czyborra wrote another explanation of Unicode's basic principles;
it's at <http://czyborra.com/unicode/characters.html>.
Czyborra has written a number of other Unicode-related documentation,
available from <http://www.cyzborra.com>.
Two other good introductory articles were written by Joel Spolsky
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html> and Jason
Orendorff <http://www.jorendorff.com/articles/unicode/>. If this
introduction didn't make things clear to you, you should try reading
one of these alternate articles before continuing.
Wikipedia entries are often helpful; see the entries for "character
encoding" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding> and UTF-8
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8>, for example.
Python's Unicode Support
------------------------
Now that you've learned the rudiments of Unicode, we can look at
Python's Unicode features.
The Unicode Type
'''''''''''''''''''
Unicode strings are expressed as instances of the ``unicode`` type,
one of Python's repertoire of built-in types. It derives from an
abstract type called ``basestring``, which is also an ancestor of the
``str`` type; you can therefore check if a value is a string type with
``isinstance(value, basestring)``. Under the hood, Python represents
Unicode strings as either 16- or 32-bit integers, depending on how the
Python interpreter was compiled.
The ``unicode()`` constructor has the signature ``unicode(string[, encoding, errors])``.
All of its arguments should be 8-bit strings. The first argument is converted
to Unicode using the specified encoding; if you leave off the ``encoding`` argument,
the ASCII encoding is used for the conversion, so characters greater than 127 will
be treated as errors::
>>> unicode('abcdef')
u'abcdef'
>>> s = unicode('abcdef')
>>> type(s)
<type 'unicode'>
>>> unicode('abcdef' + chr(255))
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 6:
ordinal not in range(128)
The ``errors`` argument specifies the response when the input string can't be converted according to the encoding's rules. Legal values for this argument
are 'strict' (raise a ``UnicodeDecodeError`` exception),
'replace' (add U+FFFD, 'REPLACEMENT CHARACTER'),
or 'ignore' (just leave the character out of the Unicode result).
The following examples show the differences::
>>> unicode('\x80abc', errors='strict')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x80 in position 0:
ordinal not in range(128)
>>> unicode('\x80abc', errors='replace')
u'\ufffdabc'
>>> unicode('\x80abc', errors='ignore')
u'abc'
Encodings are specified as strings containing the encoding's name.
Python 2.4 comes with roughly 100 different encodings; see the Python
Library Reference at
<http://docs.python.org/lib/standard-encodings.html> for a list. Some
encodings have multiple names; for example, 'latin-1', 'iso_8859_1'
and '8859' are all synonyms for the same encoding.
One-character Unicode strings can also be created with the
``unichr()`` built-in function, which takes integers and returns a
Unicode string of length 1 that contains the corresponding code point.
The reverse operation is the built-in `ord()` function that takes a
one-character Unicode string and returns the code point value::
>>> unichr(40960)
u'\ua000'
>>> ord(u'\ua000')
40960
Instances of the ``unicode`` type have many of the same methods as
the 8-bit string type for operations such as searching and formatting::
>>> s = u'Was ever feather so lightly blown to and fro as this multitude?'
>>> s.count('e')
5
>>> s.find('feather')
9
>>> s.find('bird')
-1
>>> s.replace('feather', 'sand')
u'Was ever sand so lightly blown to and fro as this multitude?'
>>> s.upper()
u'WAS EVER FEATHER SO LIGHTLY BLOWN TO AND FRO AS THIS MULTITUDE?'
Note that the arguments to these methods can be Unicode strings or 8-bit strings.
8-bit strings will be converted to Unicode before carrying out the operation;
Python's default ASCII encoding will be used, so characters greater than 127 will cause an exception::
>>> s.find('Was\x9f')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0x9f in position 3: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> s.find(u'Was\x9f')
-1
Much Python code that operates on strings will therefore work with
Unicode strings without requiring any changes to the code. (Input and
output code needs more updating for Unicode; more on this later.)
Another important method is ``.encode([encoding], [errors='strict'])``,
which returns an 8-bit string version of the
Unicode string, encoded in the requested encoding. The ``errors``
parameter is the same as the parameter of the ``unicode()``
constructor, with one additional possibility; as well as 'strict',
'ignore', and 'replace', you can also pass 'xmlcharrefreplace' which
uses XML's character references. The following example shows the
different results::
>>> u = unichr(40960) + u'abcd' + unichr(1972)
>>> u.encode('utf-8')
'\xea\x80\x80abcd\xde\xb4'
>>> u.encode('ascii')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\ua000' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> u.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
'abcd'
>>> u.encode('ascii', 'replace')
'?abcd?'
>>> u.encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')
'ꀀabcd޴'
Python's 8-bit strings have a ``.decode([encoding], [errors])`` method
that interprets the string using the given encoding::
>>> u = unichr(40960) + u'abcd' + unichr(1972) # Assemble a string
>>> utf8_version = u.encode('utf-8') # Encode as UTF-8
>>> type(utf8_version), utf8_version
(<type 'str'>, '\xea\x80\x80abcd\xde\xb4')
>>> u2 = utf8_version.decode('utf-8') # Decode using UTF-8
>>> u == u2 # The two strings match
True
The low-level routines for registering and accessing the available
encodings are found in the ``codecs`` module. However, the encoding
and decoding functions returned by this module are usually more
low-level than is comfortable, so I'm not going to describe the
``codecs`` module here. If you need to implement a completely new
encoding, you'll need to learn about the ``codecs`` module interfaces,
but implementing encodings is a specialized task that also won't be
covered here. Consult the Python documentation to learn more about
this module.
The most commonly used part of the ``codecs`` module is the
``codecs.open()`` function which will be discussed in the section
on input and output.
Unicode Literals in Python Source Code
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
In Python source code, Unicode literals are written as strings
prefixed with the 'u' or 'U' character: ``u'abcdefghijk'``. Specific
code points can be written using the ``\u`` escape sequence, which is
followed by four hex digits giving the code point. The ``\U`` escape
sequence is similar, but expects 8 hex digits, not 4.
Unicode literals can also use the same escape sequences as 8-bit
strings, including ``\x``, but ``\x`` only takes two hex digits so it
can't express an arbitrary code point. Octal escapes can go up to
U+01ff, which is octal 777.
::
>>> s = u"a\xac\u1234\u20ac\U00008000"
^^^^ two-digit hex escape
^^^^^^ four-digit Unicode escape
^^^^^^^^^^ eight-digit Unicode escape
>>> for c in s: print ord(c),
...
97 172 4660 8364 32768
Using escape sequences for code points greater than 127 is fine in
small doses, but becomes an annoyance if you're using many accented
characters, as you would in a program with messages in French or some
other accent-using language. You can also assemble strings using the
``unichr()`` built-in function, but this is even more tedious.
Ideally, you'd want to be able to write literals in your language's
natural encoding. You could then edit Python source code with your
favorite editor which would display the accented characters naturally,
and have the right characters used at runtime.
Python supports writing Unicode literals in any encoding, but you have
to declare the encoding being used. This is done by including a
special comment as either the first or second line of the source
file::
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: latin-1 -*-
u = u'abcdé'
print ord(u[-1])
The syntax is inspired by Emacs's notation for specifying variables local to a file.
Emacs supports many different variables, but Python only supports 'coding'.
The ``-*-`` symbols indicate that the comment is special; within them,
you must supply the name ``coding`` and the name of your chosen encoding,
separated by ``':'``.
If you don't include such a comment, the default encoding used will be
ASCII. Versions of Python before 2.4 were Euro-centric and assumed
Latin-1 as a default encoding for string literals; in Python 2.4,
characters greater than 127 still work but result in a warning. For
example, the following program has no encoding declaration::
#!/usr/bin/env python
u = u'abcdé'
print ord(u[-1])
When you run it with Python 2.4, it will output the following warning::
amk:~$ python p263.py
sys:1: DeprecationWarning: Non-ASCII character '\xe9'
in file p263.py on line 2, but no encoding declared;
see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details
Unicode Properties
'''''''''''''''''''
The Unicode specification includes a database of information about
code points. For each code point that's defined, the information
includes the character's name, its category, the numeric value if
applicable (Unicode has characters representing the Roman numerals and
fractions such as one-third and four-fifths). There are also
properties related to the code point's use in bidirectional text and
other display-related properties.
The following program displays some information about several
characters, and prints the numeric value of one particular character::
import unicodedata
u = unichr(233) + unichr(0x0bf2) + unichr(3972) + unichr(6000) + unichr(13231)
for i, c in enumerate(u):
print i, '%04x' % ord(c), unicodedata.category(c),
print unicodedata.name(c)
# Get numeric value of second character
print unicodedata.numeric(u[1])
When run, this prints::
0 00e9 Ll LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE
1 0bf2 No TAMIL NUMBER ONE THOUSAND
2 0f84 Mn TIBETAN MARK HALANTA
3 1770 Lo TAGBANWA LETTER SA
4 33af So SQUARE RAD OVER S SQUARED
1000.0
The category codes are abbreviations describing the nature of the
character. These are grouped into categories such as "Letter",
"Number", "Punctuation", or "Symbol", which in turn are broken up into
subcategories. To take the codes from the above output, ``'Ll'``
means 'Letter, lowercase', ``'No'`` means "Number, other", ``'Mn'`` is
"Mark, nonspacing", and ``'So'`` is "Symbol, other". See
<http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UCD.html#General_Category_Values>
for a list of category codes.
References
''''''''''''''
The Unicode and 8-bit string types are described in the Python library
reference at <http://docs.python.org/lib/typesseq.html>.
The documentation for the ``unicodedata`` module is at
<http://docs.python.org/lib/module-unicodedata.html>.
The documentation for the ``codecs`` module is at
<http://docs.python.org/lib/module-codecs.html>.
Marc-André Lemburg gave a presentation at EuroPython 2002
titled "Python and Unicode". A PDF version of his slides
is available at <http://www.egenix.com/files/python/Unicode-EPC2002-Talk.pdf>,
and is an excellent overview of the design of Python's Unicode features.
Reading and Writing Unicode Data
----------------------------------------
Once you've written some code that works with Unicode data, the next
problem is input/output. How do you get Unicode strings into your
program, and how do you convert Unicode into a form suitable for
storage or transmission?
It's possible that you may not need to do anything depending on your
input sources and output destinations; you should check whether the
libraries used in your application support Unicode natively. XML
parsers often return Unicode data, for example. Many relational
databases also support Unicode-valued columns and can return Unicode
values from an SQL query.
Unicode data is usually converted to a particular encoding before it
gets written to disk or sent over a socket. It's possible to do all
the work yourself: open a file, read an 8-bit string from it, and
convert the string with ``unicode(str, encoding)``. However, the
manual approach is not recommended.
One problem is the multi-byte nature of encodings; one Unicode
character can be represented by several bytes. If you want to read
the file in arbitrary-sized chunks (say, 1K or 4K), you need to write
error-handling code to catch the case where only part of the bytes
encoding a single Unicode character are read at the end of a chunk.
One solution would be to read the entire file into memory and then
perform the decoding, but that prevents you from working with files
that are extremely large; if you need to read a 2Gb file, you need 2Gb
of RAM. (More, really, since for at least a moment you'd need to have
both the encoded string and its Unicode version in memory.)
The solution would be to use the low-level decoding interface to catch
the case of partial coding sequences. The work of implementing this
has already been done for you: the ``codecs`` module includes a
version of the ``open()`` function that returns a file-like object
that assumes the file's contents are in a specified encoding and
accepts Unicode parameters for methods such as ``.read()`` and
``.write()``.
The function's parameters are
``open(filename, mode='rb', encoding=None, errors='strict', buffering=1)``. ``mode`` can be
``'r'``, ``'w'``, or ``'a'``, just like the corresponding parameter to the
regular built-in ``open()`` function; add a ``'+'`` to
update the file. ``buffering`` is similarly
parallel to the standard function's parameter.
``encoding`` is a string giving
the encoding to use; if it's left as ``None``, a regular Python file
object that accepts 8-bit strings is returned. Otherwise, a wrapper
object is returned, and data written to or read from the wrapper
object will be converted as needed. ``errors`` specifies the action
for encoding errors and can be one of the usual values of 'strict',
'ignore', and 'replace'.
Reading Unicode from a file is therefore simple::
import codecs
f = codecs.open('unicode.rst', encoding='utf-8')
for line in f:
print repr(line)
It's also possible to open files in update mode,
allowing both reading and writing::
f = codecs.open('test', encoding='utf-8', mode='w+')
f.write(u'\u4500 blah blah blah\n')
f.seek(0)
print repr(f.readline()[:1])
f.close()
Unicode character U+FEFF is used as a byte-order mark (BOM),
and is often written as the first character of a file in order
to assist with autodetection of the file's byte ordering.
Some encodings, such as UTF-16, expect a BOM to be present at
the start of a file; when such an encoding is used,
the BOM will be automatically written as the first character
and will be silently dropped when the file is read. There are
variants of these encodings, such as 'utf-16-le' and 'utf-16-be'
for little-endian and big-endian encodings, that specify
one particular byte ordering and don't
skip the BOM.
Unicode filenames
'''''''''''''''''''''''''
Most of the operating systems in common use today support filenames
that contain arbitrary Unicode characters. Usually this is
implemented by converting the Unicode string into some encoding that
varies depending on the system. For example, MacOS X uses UTF-8 while
Windows uses a configurable encoding; on Windows, Python uses the name
"mbcs" to refer to whatever the currently configured encoding is. On
Unix systems, there will only be a filesystem encoding if you've set
the ``LANG`` or ``LC_CTYPE`` environment variables; if you haven't,
the default encoding is ASCII.
The ``sys.getfilesystemencoding()`` function returns the encoding to
use on your current system, in case you want to do the encoding
manually, but there's not much reason to bother. When opening a file
for reading or writing, you can usually just provide the Unicode
string as the filename, and it will be automatically converted to the
right encoding for you::
filename = u'filename\u4500abc'
f = open(filename, 'w')
f.write('blah\n')
f.close()
Functions in the ``os`` module such as ``os.stat()`` will also accept
Unicode filenames.
``os.listdir()``, which returns filenames, raises an issue: should it
return the Unicode version of filenames, or should it return 8-bit
strings containing the encoded versions? ``os.listdir()`` will do
both, depending on whether you provided the directory path as an 8-bit
string or a Unicode string. If you pass a Unicode string as the path,
filenames will be decoded using the filesystem's encoding and a list
of Unicode strings will be returned, while passing an 8-bit path will
return the 8-bit versions of the filenames. For example, assuming the
default filesystem encoding is UTF-8, running the following program::
fn = u'filename\u4500abc'
f = open(fn, 'w')
f.close()
import os
print os.listdir('.')
print os.listdir(u'.')
will produce the following output::
amk:~$ python t.py
['.svn', 'filename\xe4\x94\x80abc', ...]
[u'.svn', u'filename\u4500abc', ...]
The first list contains UTF-8-encoded filenames, and the second list
contains the Unicode versions.
Tips for Writing Unicode-aware Programs
''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
This section provides some suggestions on writing software that
deals with Unicode.
The most important tip is:
Software should only work with Unicode strings internally,
converting to a particular encoding on output.
If you attempt to write processing functions that accept both
Unicode and 8-bit strings, you will find your program vulnerable to
bugs wherever you combine the two different kinds of strings. Python's
default encoding is ASCII, so whenever a character with an ASCII value >127
is in the input data, you'll get a ``UnicodeDecodeError``
because that character can't be handled by the ASCII encoding.
It's easy to miss such problems if you only test your software
with data that doesn't contain any
accents; everything will seem to work, but there's actually a bug in your
program waiting for the first user who attempts to use characters >127.
A second tip, therefore, is:
Include characters >127 and, even better, characters >255 in your
test data.
When using data coming from a web browser or some other untrusted source,
a common technique is to check for illegal characters in a string
before using the string in a generated command line or storing it in a
database. If you're doing this, be careful to check
the string once it's in the form that will be used or stored; it's
possible for encodings to be used to disguise characters. This is especially
true if the input data also specifies the encoding;
many encodings leave the commonly checked-for characters alone,
but Python includes some encodings such as ``'base64'``
that modify every single character.
For example, let's say you have a content management system that takes a
Unicode filename, and you want to disallow paths with a '/' character.
You might write this code::
def read_file (filename, encoding):
if '/' in filename:
raise ValueError("'/' not allowed in filenames")
unicode_name = filename.decode(encoding)
f = open(unicode_name, 'r')
# ... return contents of file ...
However, if an attacker could specify the ``'base64'`` encoding,
they could pass ``'L2V0Yy9wYXNzd2Q='``, which is the base-64
encoded form of the string ``'/etc/passwd'``, to read a
system file. The above code looks for ``'/'`` characters
in the encoded form and misses the dangerous character
in the resulting decoded form.
References
''''''''''''''
The PDF slides for Marc-André Lemburg's presentation "Writing
Unicode-aware Applications in Python" are available at
<http://www.egenix.com/files/python/LSM2005-Developing-Unicode-aware-applications-in-Python.pdf>
and discuss questions of character encodings as well as how to
internationalize and localize an application.
Revision History and Acknowledgements
------------------------------------------
Thanks to the following people who have noted errors or offered
suggestions on this article: Nicholas Bastin,
Marius Gedminas, Kent Johnson, Ken Krugler,
Marc-André Lemburg, Martin von Löwis, Chad Whitacre.
Version 1.0: posted August 5 2005.
Version 1.01: posted August 7 2005. Corrects factual and markup
errors; adds several links.
Version 1.02: posted August 16 2005. Corrects factual errors.
.. comment Additional topic: building Python w/ UCS2 or UCS4 support
.. comment Describe obscure -U switch somewhere?
.. comment Describe use of codecs.StreamRecoder and StreamReaderWriter
.. comment
Original outline:
- [ ] Unicode introduction
- [ ] ASCII
- [ ] Terms
- [ ] Character
- [ ] Code point
- [ ] Encodings
- [ ] Common encodings: ASCII, Latin-1, UTF-8
- [ ] Unicode Python type
- [ ] Writing unicode literals
- [ ] Obscurity: -U switch
- [ ] Built-ins
- [ ] unichr()
- [ ] ord()
- [ ] unicode() constructor
- [ ] Unicode type
- [ ] encode(), decode() methods
- [ ] Unicodedata module for character properties
- [ ] I/O
- [ ] Reading/writing Unicode data into files
- [ ] Byte-order marks
- [ ] Unicode filenames
- [ ] Writing Unicode programs
- [ ] Do everything in Unicode
- [ ] Declaring source code encodings (PEP 263)
- [ ] Other issues
- [ ] Building Python (UCS2, UCS4)