Entries published on September 5, 2017
How Python does Unicode
As we all (hopefully) know by now, Python 3 made a significant change to how strings work in the language. I’m on the record as being strongly in favor of this change, and I’ve written at length about why I think it was the right thing to do. But for those who’ve been living under a rock the past ten years or so, here’s a brief summary, because it’s relevant to what I want to go into today:
In Python 2, two types could be used to represent strings. One of them, str, was a “byte string” type; it represented …