Viewing posts tagged characters
We're going to roll our own hexdump program here. A hexdump program is a useful tool for a Python programmer. It allows one to learn about UTF-8 and other Unicode character encodings, examine input and output data, troubleshoot Python source code encoding, and so on.
We're going to explain a few things about character codes and encodings here. Even though there is increasingly only Unicode and UTF-8 these days, beginning developers continue to have a hard time.
Someone asked me the other day about how laser printers work and it started me thinking about just how far we've come from the days of traditional printing and typography. It's interesting to think about how it all evolved and where the terminology came from and I took some time to write up a piece on the fundamental ideas (in a more article-type style then my usual posts).