CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstringmultibytemultibyte-functions
hungneox
hungneox

Reputation: 9829

How to handle multibyte string in Python

There are multibyte string functions in PHP to handle multibyte string (e.g:CJK script). For example, I want to count how many letters in a multi bytes string by using len function in python, but it return an inaccurate result (i.e number of bytes in this string)

japanese = "桜の花びらたち"
print japanese
print len(japanese)#return 21 instead of 7

Is there any package or function like mb_strlen in PHP?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 8809

Answers (2)

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Reputation: 66930

Use Unicode strings:

# Encoding: UTF-8

japanese = u"桜の花びらたち"
print japanese
print len(japanese)

Note the u in front of the string.

To convert a bytestring into Unicode, use decode: "桜の花びらたち".decode('utf-8')

Upvotes: 9

Has QUIT--Anony-Mousse
Has QUIT--Anony-Mousse

Reputation: 77454

Try converting it to unicode first:

print len(japanese.decode("utf-8"))

gives 7. You are working on the utf-8 encoded string, which indeed has 21 bytes.

Upvotes: 3

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