This is a related question. I perform an octal dump on a file: $ od -cx file 0000000 h e l l o w o r l d \n 6568 6c6c 206f 6f77 6c72 0a64
I want to output the names of those characters: $ python3 Python 3.2.3 (default, May 19 2012, 17:01:30) [GCC 4.6.3] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import unicodedata >>> unicodedata.name("\u0068") 'LATIN SMALL LETTER H' >>> unicodedata.name("\u0065") 'LATIN SMALL LETTER E' But, how to do this programatically: >>> first_two_letters = "6568 6c6c 206f 6f77 6c72 >>> 0a64".split()[0] >>> first_two_letters '6568' >>> first_letter = "00" + first_two_letters[2:] >>> first_letter '0068' Now what? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list