Ron Garret wrote:
I would have thought that the answer would be: the default encoding
(duh!) But empirically this appears not to be the case:
unicode('\xb5')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xb5 in position 0:
ordinal not in range(128)
The unicode function is usually used to decode bytes read from *external
sources*, each of which can have its own encoding. So the function
(actually, developer crew) refuses to guess and uses the ascii common
subset.
u'\xb5'
u'\xb5'
print u'\xb5'
�
Unicode literals are *in the source file*, which can only have one
encoding (for a given source file).
(That last character shows up as a micron sign despite the fact that my
default encoding is ascii, so it seems to me that that unicode string
must somehow have picked up a latin-1 encoding.)
I think latin-1 was the default without a coding cookie line. (May be
uft-8 in 3.0).
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