why I run re.findall('[%s]' % zhon.hanzi.characters, 'I broke a plate: 我打破了一个盘子.'), I got an empty []

[legend0011]

why I run re.findall('[%s]' % zhon.hanzi.characters, 'I broke a plate: 我打破了一个盘子.'), I got an empty []???

I use python 2.7.3, ubuntu 12.04

[tsroten]

@legend0011 It looks like the string you are using is not a Unicode string, yet it contains Unicode characters. Here are two ways you can fix it.

1. Prefix the string with u:

>>> import re
>>> import zhon.hanzi
>>> # Notice the "u" in the next line.
... characters = re.findall('[%s]' % zhon.hanzi.characters, u'I broke a plate: 我打破了一个盘子.')
>>> characters
[u'\u6211', u'\u6253', u'\u7834', u'\u4e86', u'\u4e00', u'\u4e2a', u'\u76d8', u'\u5b50']
>>> for character in characters:
...    print character
我
打
破
了
一
个
盘
子

2. Make all the strings in your code Unicode by default.

>>> from __future__ import unicode_literals
>>> import re
>>> import zhon.hanzi.characters
>>> characters = re.findall('[%s]' % zhon.hanzi.characters, 'I broke a plate: 我打破了一个盘子.')
>>> characters
[u'\u6211', u'\u6253', u'\u7834', u'\u4e86', u'\u4e00', u'\u4e2a', u'\u76d8', u'\u5b50']
>>> for character in characters:
...    print character
我
打
破
了
一
个
盘
子

Does that make sense?

[legend0011]

Yes, that's very good help!!! Thank you very much!!! Still, I have a problem, if I pass an argument s, how can I transfer it to unicode ? I tried re.findall('[%s]' % zhon.hanzi.characters, s.decode('unicode-escape')), but it doesn't work.

[legend0011]

oh, I found a solution : re.findall('[%s]' % zhon.hanzi.characters, unicode(s, "utf-8")), it seems it works. Is that a good way?

[tsroten]

@legend0011 Yes, that's a good way. You can also do s.decode('utf-8').