Unicode/UTF-8 confusion

T

Tom Stambaugh

I'm still confused about this, even after days of hacking at it. It's time I
asked for help. I understand that each of you knows more about Python,
Javascript, unicode, and programming than me, and I understand that each of
you has a higher SAT score than me. So please try and be gentle with your
responses.

I use simplejson to serialize html strings that the server is delivering to
a browser. Since the apostrophe is a string terminator in javascript, I need
to escape any apostrophe embedded in the html.

Just to be clear, the specific unicode character I'm struggling with is
described in Python as:
u'\N{APOSTROPHE}'}. It has a standardized utf-8 value (according to, for
example, http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0027/index.htm) of
0x27.

This can be expressed in several common ways:
hex: 0x27
Python literal: u"\u0027"

Suppose I start with some test string that contains an embedded
apostrophe -- for example: u" ' ". I believe that the appropriate json
serialization of this is (presented as a list to eliminate notation
ambiguities):

['"', ' ', ' ', ' ', '\\', '\\', '0', '0', '2', '7', ' ', ' ', ' ', '"']

This is a 14-character utf-8 serialization of the above test string.

I know I can brute-force this, using something like the following:
def encode(aRawString):
aReplacement = ''.join(['\\', '0', '0', '2', '7'])
aCookedString = aRawString.replace("'", aReplacement)
answer = simplejson.dumps(aCookedString)
return answer

I can't even make mailers let me *TYPE* a string literal for the replacement
string without trying to turn it into an HTML link!

Anyway, I know that my "encode" function works, but it pains me to add that
"replace" call before *EVERY* invocation of the simplejson.dumps() method.
The reason I upgraded to 1.7.4 was to get the c-level speedup routine now
offered by simplejson -- yet the need to do this apostrophe escaping seems
to negate this advantage! Is there perhaps some combination of dumps keyword
arguments, python encode()/str() magic, or something similar that
accomplishes this same result?

What is the highest-performance way to get simplejson to emit the desired
serialization of the given test string?
 
M

Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch

I'm still confused about this, even after days of hacking at it. It's time I
asked for help. I understand that each of you knows more about Python,
Javascript, unicode, and programming than me, and I understand that each of
you has a higher SAT score than me. So please try and be gentle with your
responses.

I use simplejson to serialize html strings that the server is delivering to
a browser. Since the apostrophe is a string terminator in javascript, I need
to escape any apostrophe embedded in the html.

Just to be clear, the specific unicode character I'm struggling with is
described in Python as:
u'\N{APOSTROPHE}'}. It has a standardized utf-8 value (according to, for
example, http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0027/index.htm) of
0x27.

This can be expressed in several common ways:
hex: 0x27
Python literal: u"\u0027"

Suppose I start with some test string that contains an embedded
apostrophe -- for example: u" ' ". I believe that the appropriate json
serialization of this is (presented as a list to eliminate notation
ambiguities):

['"', ' ', ' ', ' ', '\\', '\\', '0', '0', '2', '7', ' ', ' ', ' ', '"']

This is a 14-character utf-8 serialization of the above test string.

I know I can brute-force this, using something like the following:
def encode(aRawString):
aReplacement = ''.join(['\\', '0', '0', '2', '7'])
aCookedString = aRawString.replace("'", aReplacement)
answer = simplejson.dumps(aCookedString)
return answer

I can't even make mailers let me *TYPE* a string literal for the replacement
string without trying to turn it into an HTML link!

Anyway, I know that my "encode" function works, but it pains me to add that
"replace" call before *EVERY* invocation of the simplejson.dumps() method.
The reason I upgraded to 1.7.4 was to get the c-level speedup routine now
offered by simplejson -- yet the need to do this apostrophe escaping seems
to negate this advantage! Is there perhaps some combination of dumps keyword
arguments, python encode()/str() magic, or something similar that
accomplishes this same result?

What is the highest-performance way to get simplejson to emit the desired
serialization of the given test string?

Somehow I don't get what you are after. The ' doesn't have to be escaped
at all if " are used to delimit the string. If ' are used as delimiters
then \' is a correct escaping. What is the problem with that!?

Ciao,
Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch
 

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