I want my function to take an argument that could be an unicode object or a utf-8 encoded string. Inside my function, I want to convert the argument to unicode. I have something like this:
def myfunction(text):
if not isinstance(text, unicode):
text = unicode(text, 'utf-8')
...
Is it possible to avoid the use of isinstance? I was looking for something more duck-typing friendly.
During my experiments with decoding, I have run into several weird behaviours of Python. For instance:
>>> u'hello'.decode('utf-8')
u'hello'
>>> u'cer\xf3n'.decode('utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/python2.6/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xf3' in po
sition 3: ordinal not in range(128)
Or
>>> u'hello'.decode('utf-8')
u'hello' 12:11
>>> unicode(u'hello', 'utf-8')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<input>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: decoding Unicode is not supported
By the way. I'm using Python 2.6