Convert Unicode/UTF-8 string to lower/upper case using pure & pythonic library

Question

I use Google App Engine and cannot use any C/C++ extension, just pure & pythonic library to do conversion of Unicode/UTF-8 strings to lower/upper case. str.lower() and string.lowercase() don't.

Marra

Answer 1

str encoded in UTF-8 and unicode are two different types. Don't use string, use the appropriate method on the unicode object:

>>> print u'ĉ'.upper()
Ĉ

Decode str to unicode before using:

>>> print 'ĉ'.decode('utf-8').upper()
Ĉ

Priester

Thanks. Is this applicable to Vietnamese? – Marra

It should be. It's not hard to test in the interactive interpreter. – Priester

My code does not work for Russian and Vietnamese. I don't know other languages oladic.appspot.com/add/ОИЧУНКАЛС oladic.appspot.com/add/TÌNH%20YÊU oladic.appspot.com/add/ĉĉĉĉ – Marra

Finally it worked! Thank you very much! I wish I could vote more! – Marra

Viet: you probably want to URL-encode unicode characters if you're putting them in a URL (although it's probably easier to just POST them as utf-8, assuming you're using a form to submit them). – Baguette

Python 3: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode' – Antin