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Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2013 13:05:49 -0700
Subject: Re: Changing filenames from Greeklish => Greek (subprocess complain)
From: Benjamin Kaplan <benjamin.kaplan@case.edu>
To: "python-list@python.org" <python-list@python.org>
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On Sun, Jun 9, 2013 at 2:38 AM, =CE=9D=CE=B9=CE=BA=CF=8C=CE=BB=CE=B1=CE=BF=
=CF=82 =CE=9A=CE=BF=CF=8D=CF=81=CE=B1=CF=82 <nikos.gr33k@gmail.com> wrote:
> =CE=A4=CE=B7 =CE=9A=CF=85=CF=81=CE=B9=CE=B1=CE=BA=CE=AE, 9 =CE=99=CE=BF=
=CF=85=CE=BD=CE=AF=CE=BF=CF=85 2013 12:20:58 =CE=BC.=CE=BC. UTC+3, =CE=BF =
=CF=87=CF=81=CE=AE=CF=83=CF=84=CE=B7=CF=82 Lele Gaifax =CE=AD=CE=B3=CF=81=
=CE=B1=CF=88=CE=B5:
>
>> > How about a string i wonder?
>> > s =3D "=CE=BD=CE=AF=CE=BA=CE=BF=CF=82"
>> > what_are these_bytes =3D s.encode('iso-8869-7').encode(utf-8')
>
>> Ignoring the usual syntax error, this is just a variant of the code I
>> posted: "s.encode('iso-8869-7')" produces a bytes instance which
>> *cannot* be "re-encoded" again in whatever encoding.
>
> s =3D 'a'
> s =3D s.encode('iso-8859-7').decode('utf-8')
> print( s )
>
> a (we got the original character back)
> =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
> s =3D '=CE=B1'
> s =3D s.encode('iso-8859-7').decode('utf-8')
> print( s )
>
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe1 in position 0: u=
nexpected end of data
>
> Why this error? because 'a' ordinal value > 127 ?
> --

No. You get that error because the string is not encoded in UTF-8.
It's encoded in ISO-8859-7. For ASCII strings (ord(x) < 127),
ISO-8859-7 and UTF-8 look exactly the same. For anything else, they
are different. If you were to try to decode it as ISO-8859-1, it would
succeed, but you would get the character "=C3=A1" back instead of =CE=B1.

You're misunderstanding the decode function. Decode doesn't turn it
into a string with the specified encoding. It takes it *from* the
string with the specified encoding and turns it into Python's internal
string representation. In Python 3.3, that encoding doesn't even have
a name because it's not a standard encoding. So you want the decode
argument to match the encode argument.