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Title: Understanding Unicode in Python: ASCII Default Encoding and Unicode Characters
Introduction:
Python is a versatile and powerful programming language, known for its simplicity and readability. When working with text in Python, understanding character encoding is crucial. The default encoding in Python 2 was ASCII, but Python 3 changed it to UTF-8. However, you might wonder why Python prints Unicode characters even when the default encoding is ASCII. This tutorial aims to explain this phenomenon and provide code examples to illustrate the concepts.
Character Encoding in Python:
Character encoding is a way to represent characters using numeric values, allowing computers to store and communicate textual information. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a widely used character encoding that represents English characters with numeric values from 0 to 127.
Python 3 switched its default encoding from ASCII to UTF-8, which supports a broader range of characters, including those from non-English languages and special symbols. This change facilitates handling diverse text data, but it can lead to confusion when working with Unicode characters.
Code Example:
Let's explore why Python prints Unicode characters with ASCII as the default encoding using a simple code example.
Explanation:
In the above code, we have two strings: ascii_string contains only ASCII characters, and unicode_string contains Unicode characters. When you run this code in a Python 3 environment, you will notice that both strings are printed correctly, even though the default encoding is UTF-8.
Python 3's print function automatically handles encoding, and it can print Unicode characters even when the default encoding is ASCII. This behavior is due to