Strings

Conceptionally, a string is a list of characters such as 'A', 'B', 'C' or 'È'. Characters are abstract representations and their meaning depends on the language and context they are used in. The Unicode standard describes how characters are represented by code points. For example the characters above are represented with the code points U+0041, U+0042, U+0043, and U+00C9, respectively. Basically, code points are numbers in the range from 0 to 0x10FFFF.

The representation of a string as a list of code points is abstract. In order to convert this abstract representation into a sequence of bytes the Unicode string must be encoded. The simplest from of encoding is ASCII and is performed as follows:

Although ASCII encoding is simple to apply it can only encode for 128 different characters which is hardly enough. One of the most commonly used encodings that addresses this problem is UTF-8 (it can handle any Unicode code point). UTF stands for “Unicode Transformation Format”, and the ‘8’ means that 8-bit numbers are used in the encoding.

Python 2 comes with two different kinds of objects that can be used to represent strings, str and unicode. Instances of unicode are used to express Unicode strings, whereas instances of the str type are byte representations (the encoded string). Under the hood, Python represents Unicode strings as either 16- or 32-bit integers, depending on how the Python interpreter was compiled.

>>> unicode_string = u"Fu\u00dfb\u00e4lle"
>>> print unicode_string
Fußbälle

Unicode strings can be converted to 8-bit strings with unicode.encode(). Python’s 8-bit strings have a str.decode() method that interprets the string using the given encoding (that is, it is the inverse of the unicode.encode()):

>>> type(unicode_string)
<type 'unicode'>
>>> unicode_string.encode("utf-8")
'Fu\xc3\x9fb\xc3\xa4lle'
>>> utf8_string = unicode_string.encode("utf-8")
>>> type(utf8_string)
<type 'str'>
>>> unicode_string == utf8_string.decode("utf-8")
True

Unfortunately, Python 2.x allows you to mix unicode and str if the 8-bit string happened to contain only 7-bit (ASCII) bytes, but would get UnicodeDecodeError if it contained non-ASCII values.

Since Python 3.0, all strings are stored as Unicode in an instance of the str type. Encoded strings on the other hand are represented as binary data in the form of instances of the bytes type. Conceptionally, str refers to text, whereas bytes refers to data. Use encode() to go from str to bytes, and decode() to go from bytes to str.

In addition, it is no longer possible to mix Unicode strings with encoded strings, because it will result in a TypeError:

>>> text = "Fu\u00dfb\u00e4lle"
>>> data = b" sind rund"
>>> text + data
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: Can't convert 'bytes' object to str implicitly
>>> text + data.decode("utf-8")
'Fußbälle sind rund'
>>> text.encode("utf-8") + data
b'Fu\xc3\x9fb\xc3\xa4lle sind rund'

GTK+ uses UTF-8 encoded strings for all text. This means that if you call a method that returns a string you will always obtain an instance of the str type. The same applies to methods that expect one or more strings as parameter, they must be UTF-8 encoded. However, for convenience PyGObject will automatically convert any unicode instance to str if supplied as argument:

>>> from gi.repository import Gtk
>>> label = Gtk.Label()
>>> unicode_string = u"Fu\u00dfb\u00e4lle"
>>> label.set_text(unicode_string)
>>> txt = label.get_text()
>>> type(txt)
<type 'str'>

Furthermore:

>>> txt == unicode_string

would return False, with the warning __main__:1: UnicodeWarning: Unicode equal comparison failed to convert both arguments to Unicode - interpreting them as being unequal (Gtk.Label.get_text() will always return a str instance; therefore, txt and unicode_string are not equal).

This is especially important if you want to internationalize your program using gettext. You have to make sure that gettext will return UTF-8 encoded 8-bit strings for all languages.

In general it is recommended to not use unicode objects in GTK+ applications at all, and only use UTF-8 encoded str objects since GTK+ does not fully integrate with unicode objects.

With Python 3.x things are much more consistent, because PyGObject will automatically encode/decode to/from UTF-8 if you pass a string to a method or a method returns a string. Strings, or text, will always be represented as instances of str only:

How To Deal With Strings - The Python GTK+ 3 Tutorial