Handling Unicode Strings?

[SoulMazer]

Hi, I'm writing a program that goes through all of the music in a user-specified directory and I am having some trouble with Unicode characters. More specifically, 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\\xe7' . The song names need to both be printed to a HTML page as well as be passed to other HTML/CGI pages via the GET method.

What can I do to be more aware of these evil Unicode characters? I tried to simply convert to Unicode where I could in my program but then there comes the trouble of keeping this consistent among the databases and song names/albums/artists they are tied to. Also, I seemed to have trouble looking up things in a dictionary when they had inconsistent encoding.

What do all you intelligent people of the Python forum recommend?

[Gribouillis]

I have a good link about unicode http://farmdev.com/talks/unicode/

[SoulMazer]

That was a great presentation. It took me a second to figure out I had to click to advance the slides.

Okay, then just one last question. Can I write to a database (via sqlite3) in Unicode? Or what should I do?

Thanks.

[Gribouillis]

I don't use sqlite3, but the answer is in the doc http://docs.python.org/library/sqlite3.html?highlight=sqlite3#sqlite-and-python-types . You should be able to use unicode directly in sqlite3 (as in most python modules)

[SoulMazer]

Perfect. Thanks Gribouillis. Problem solved.