Working out what encode/decode really do.

gistfile1.txt

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from unittest import TestCase
import unittest
import io

class unicodeTest(TestCase):

    def test_ascii_start(self):
        uni_str=u'hello' 
        print uni_str
        print uni_str.decode()
        print uni_str.encode()
        self.assertEqual("","")

    def test_complex_start(self):
        uni_str=u'hellø' 
        print uni_str
        print uni_str.encode("utf8") # Okay, encode's argument is to identify the code you are writing. So if it's ascii, there are errors when there isn't an ascii option. 
        self.assertEqual("","")
        # str.encode([encoding[, errors]])
        #
        #    Return an encoded version of the string. Default encoding is the current default string encoding. errors may be given to set a different error handling scheme. The default for errors is 'strict', meaning that encoding errors raise a UnicodeError. Other possible values are 'ignore', 'replace', 'xmlcharrefreplace', 'backslashreplace' and any other name registered via codecs.register_error(), see section Codec Base Classes. For a list of possible encodings, see section Standard Encodings.


    def test_emoji(self):
        uni_st=u"à"
        print len(uni_st)
        encoded_str=uni_st.encode('utf8')
        print "({})".format(encoded_str)

    def test_writing_a_file(self):
        filename="Ελπίζω" #I expected this to automatically be a unicode string but it wasn't 
        print type(filename) 
        filename_u=u"Ελπίζω" 
        print type(filename_u) 
        print filename
        print filename_u
        #but both print fine because :shrug
        f = open(filename+"s.txt", "w")
        f.write("Now the file has more content!")
        f.close()
        f = open(filename_u+"u.txt", "w")
        f.write("Now the file has more content!")
        f.close()

    def test_writing_inside_a_file(self):
        filename="Ελπίζω" #I expected this to automatically be a unicode string but it wasn't 
        print type(filename) 
        filename_u=u"Ελπίζω" 
        print type(filename_u) 
        print filename
        print filename_u
        #but both print fine because :shrug
        f = open(filename+"si.txt", "w")
        f.write(filename)
        f.close()
        f = io.open(filename_u+"ui.txt", "w")
        f.write(filename_u)
        f.close()

if __name__=="__main__":
    unittest.main()