Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info>: > On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 18:32:39 +0300, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: >> Unicode, like ASCII, is a code. Representing text in unicode is >> encoding. > > A Unicode string as an abstract data type has no encoding.
Unicode itself is an encoding. See it in action here: 72 101 108 108 111 44 32 119 111 114 108 100 > It is a Platonic ideal, a pure form like the real numbers. Far from it. It is a mapping from symbols to integers. The symbols are the Platonic ones. The Unicode/ASCII encoding above represents the same "Platonic" string as this ESCDIC one: 212 133 147 147 150 107 64 166 150 153 137 132 > Unicode string like this: > > s = u"NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!" > > should not be thought of as a bunch of bytes in some encoding, Encoding is not tied to bytes or even computers. People can speak in code, after all. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list