On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 2:27 PM, william tanksley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Awesome... Thank you! I had my mental model of Python turned around > backwards. That's an odd feeling. Okay, so you decode to go from raw > byes into a given encoding, and you encode to go from a given encoding > to raw bytes. Not what I thought it was, but that's cool, makes sense.
That's not quite right. Decoding takes a byte string that is already in a particular encoding and transforms it to unicode. Unicode isn't a encoding of it's own. Decoding takes a unicode string (which doesn't have any encoding associated with it), and gives you back a sequence of bytes in a particular encoding. This article isn't specific to Python, but it provides a good overview of unicode and character encodings that may be useful: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html -- Jerry -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
