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What are the differences between ASCII and Unicode in Python?

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In the realm of data engineering, understanding the encoding standards such as ASCII and Unicode is paramount. Python, a language widely used for data manipulation, supports both these encoding schemes, which are essential for text processing. ASCII, an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication, encoding 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers. Unicode, on the other hand, is a comprehensive encoding standard that provides a unique number for every character, no matter the platform, program, or language, thus supporting a vast array of characters and symbols from different languages.

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1 ASCII Basics

ASCII is the elder of the two, created in the 1960s to standardize the representation of text in computers. It uses 7 bits to represent each character, allowing for 128 unique combinations, which include English letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters like newline or carriage return. In Python, you can easily work with ASCII using string literals and the ord() function to find an ASCII value of a single character. For example, ord('A') returns 65, the ASCII code for the uppercase 'A'.

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Simran Bayas

Associate Data Engineer @EAB | MS CS'24 @George Mason University Alum | 2+ years experience in Data Engineering
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ASCII, created in the 1960s, standardized text representation in computers. It uses 7 bits per character, offering 128 unique combinations for English letters, digits, punctuation, and control characters. In Python, you can work with ASCII using string literals and the `ord()` function. For example, `ord('A')` returns 65, the ASCII code for 'A'.

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Vivek Kumar Astikar

Data Engineer @CloudAI | Problem Solver | @Google & @Microsoft Certified | Magma M Scholar | @Data Maverick | Building the future with AI
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ASCII and Unicode are character sets for computers. Imagine ASCII like a small alphabet, only for English letters, numbers, and some symbols. Unicode is a super-alphabet that can write everything, from any language to emojis! Python uses Unicode by default, so you can write anything you want. Let's see an example: € (Euro symbol) ASCII (limited characters) shows a weird character because it can't represent Euro. Unicode (all characters) shows the correct Euro symbol (€). #Happy_Learning

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Dinesh Thapa

I Build Digital Empires | Growth Hacker | 10X Business Growth with AI, Big Data & Digital Strategy | Scale Smarter. Automate Faster. Dominate Your Industry.
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ASCII is a character encoding standard used in Python and other programming languages. ?? It was originally designed to represent 128 English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127. ?? This includes uppercase and lowercase English letters, digits, punctuation marks, and control characters. ?? ASCII is limited to these 128 symbols and does not support characters from other languages or special symbols, making it less versatile for global applications. It is, however, simple and widely compatible, making it suitable for basic text data that strictly involves English characters.

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Rahul S

Sr. Engineering Manager - Data at Xiaomi Technology | Ex-Amazon, Merck | Top Data Engineer Voice - Principal Architect - ?? Certified AWS Architect - Azure Cloud ? - SAFe?5 Agilist - Mentor - Hiring Data Engineers
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In Python, ASCII and Unicode are two character encoding standards used to represent text. 33 non-printable control characters, 95 printable characters, including digits, lowercase and uppercase English letters, punctuation marks, and a few special symbols. Unicode is a comprehensive standard designed to cover all characters from all writing systems, symbols, and control characters. It includes characters from virtually all languages, including modern and ancient scripts, as well as a vast array of symbols, emoji, and other textual elements.

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2 Unicode Explored

Unicode was developed to overcome the limitations of ASCII by including characters from all writing systems, not just English. It uses different encoding forms like UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, with UTF-8 being the most common on the web. In Python, strings are Unicode by default. You can encode a Unicode string to a bytes object in UTF-8 format using the encode() method, or decode bytes to a string using decode() . For instance, 'hello'.encode('utf-8') converts the string to its UTF-8 encoded version.

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M Haseeb Asif

Unlocking Business Value Through Financial Data Innovation
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Unicode is more comprehensive than ASCII as it covers a lot more and is designed to support all the different languages and their unique symbols. On the other hand, it takes more storage than ASCII. However, It does allow you to communicate across the globe as it can handle almost any language. It does have different types of encoding such as UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32, with UTF-8 being the most common on the web.

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Dinesh Thapa

I Build Digital Empires | Growth Hacker | 10X Business Growth with AI, Big Data & Digital Strategy | Scale Smarter. Automate Faster. Dominate Your Industry.
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Unicode is a comprehensive character encoding system designed to support text representation from all languages and a myriad of symbols, making it vastly more expansive than ASCII. ?? It can encode over 1 million characters, covering scripts from around the globe, emojis, historic scripts, and various symbol sets. ?? Unlike ASCII’s limited 7-bit encoding, Unicode uses different encoding forms like UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 to accommodate its extensive range of characters. ?? UTF-8, the most commonly used form, is particularly beneficial in Python, as it offers backward compatibility with ASCII while allowing for the efficient encoding of a vast array of additional characters.

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3 Encoding in Python

Python's flexibility with text encoding allows you to handle both ASCII and Unicode efficiently. By default, Python 3 uses Unicode encoding for strings, which means you can include a wide variety of characters from different languages directly in your code. However, when you need to ensure compatibility or work with binary data, you may have to explicitly encode or decode strings using ASCII. For example, 'data'.encode('ascii') encodes the string 'data' into its ASCII representation.

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Ivan de Castro

boosting revenue & efficiency with AI-driven decisions
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Python 2 utilizes ASCII, while Python 3 strings are based on Unicode. If you want to set a different encoding from the console, you can set below console variables: PYTHONIOENCODING="utf-16-be"

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M Haseeb Asif

Unlocking Business Value Through Financial Data Innovation
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Python is quite comprehensive with the encoding and allows you to encode in both ASCII and Unicode at the same time. Just be aware the default settings for Python 2 and Python 3 are different as Python 3 has Unicode as the default encoding. Unicode encoding is more comprehensive as it has more characters and can cover almost all the language representations across the globe. So, while working with ASCII in Python you need to explicitly use the methods to encode and decode into ASCII.

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4 Decoding Challenges

While working with text data in Python, you might encounter decoding errors when the encoding of the text is unknown or not properly specified. ASCII can only represent a limited set of characters, so trying to decode a byte string that contains characters outside of the ASCII range using ASCII encoding will result in an error. Unicode's UTF-8 encoding can cover a much broader range of characters, making it more robust for internationalization. For instance, decoding a byte string with Chinese characters using ASCII would fail, but UTF-8 would handle it gracefully.

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5 Practical Considerations

As a data engineer, you'll often have to decide which encoding to use based on the data's origin and the systems that will process it. If your work involves only English text and legacy systems, ASCII may suffice. However, for applications that handle multiple languages or require compatibility with modern internet standards, Unicode is the way to go. When reading or writing files in Python, always specify the encoding to avoid unexpected behaviors; use open('file.txt', 'r', encoding='utf-8') to read a file with UTF-8 encoding.

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6 Compatibility Issues

Compatibility between ASCII and Unicode is a common concern. Fortunately, UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII. This means that any valid ASCII text is also valid UTF-8 text. However, the reverse is not true; Unicode characters that do not have an equivalent ASCII representation cannot be directly translated into ASCII. This can lead to data loss or corruption if not handled correctly. When transferring data between systems that may not support Unicode, it's crucial to consider potential encoding issues and plan accordingly.

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7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

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Bimalya Herath

BSc in Financial Engineering, Faculty of Science, University of Colombo (Reading) | BSc(Hons) in Business Data Analytics, University of Westminster - UK (Reading) | CIMA - UK (Following)
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1. Number of Characters 2. Size 3. Character Set 4. Subset 5. Encoding In conclusion, while ASCII is sufficient for texts that use only the basic English alphabet, Unicode is more versatile and can represent characters from many different languages and scripts, making it more suitable for international use.

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What are the differences between ASCII and Unicode in Python?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1 ASCII Basics

2 Unicode Explored

3 Encoding in Python

4 Decoding Challenges

5 Practical Considerations

6 Compatibility Issues

7 Here’s what else to consider

Data Engineering

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What are the differences between ASCII and Unicode in Python?

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

1 ASCII Basics

2 Unicode Explored

3 Encoding in Python

4 Decoding Challenges

5 Practical Considerations

6 Compatibility Issues

7 Here’s what else to consider

Data Engineering

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