Some punctuation and symbols: '$' and '!', to name a couple.ASCII is a good place to start learning about character encoding because it is a small and contained encoding. Whether you’re self-taught or have a formal computer science background, chances are you’ve seen an ASCII table once or twice. The best way to start understanding what they are is to cover one of the simplest character encodings, ASCII. There are tens if not hundreds of character encodings. Be familiar with Python’s built-in functions related to character encodings and numbering systemsĬharacter encoding and numbering systems are so closely connected that they need to be covered in the same tutorial or else the treatment of either would be totally inadequate.įree Download: Get a sample chapter from Python Tricks: The Book that shows you Python’s best practices with simple examples you can apply instantly to write more beautiful + Pythonic code.

Know about support in Python for numbering systems through its various forms of int literals.

Understand how encoding comes into play with Python’s str and bytes.

Get conceptual overviews on character encodings and numbering systems.

You’ll see how to use concepts of character encodings in live Python code. You’ll still get a language-agnostic primer, but you’ll then dive into illustrations in Python, with text-heavy paragraphs kept to a minimum. This tutorial is different because it’s not language-agnostic but instead deliberately Python-centric. Python’s Unicode support is strong and robust, but it takes some time to master. This tutorial is designed to clear the Exception fog and illustrate that working with text and binary data in Python 3 can be a smooth experience.

Places such as Stack Overflow have thousands of questions stemming from confusion over exceptions like UnicodeDecodeError and UnicodeEncodeError. Handling character encodings in Python or any other language can at times seem painful.

Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Unicode in Python: Working With Character Encodings

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team.

Encoding in reading examples