Kitchen.text.converters

Functions to handle conversion of byte bytes and str strings.

Changed in version kitchen: 0.2a2 ; API kitchen.text 2.0.0 Added getwriter()

Changed in version kitchen: 0.2.2 ; API kitchen.text 2.1.0 Added exception_to_unicode(), exception_to_bytes(), EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS, and BYTE_EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS

Changed in version kitchen: 1.0.1 ; API kitchen.text 2.1.1 Deprecated BYTE_EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS as we’ve simplified exception_to_unicode() and exception_to_bytes() to make it unnecessary

Byte Strings and Unicode in Python2

Python2 has two string types, str and unicode. unicode represents an abstract sequence of text characters. It can hold any character that is present in the unicode standard. str can hold any byte of data. The operating system and python work together to display these bytes as characters in many cases but you should always keep in mind that the information is really a sequence of bytes, not a sequence of characters. In python2 these types are interchangeable a large amount of the time. They are one of the few pairs of types that automatically convert when used in equality:

>>> # string is converted to unicode and then compared
>>> "I am a string" == u"I am a string"
True
>>> # Other types, like int, don't have this special treatment
>>> 5 == "5"
False

However, this automatic conversion tends to lull people into a false sense of security. As long as you’re dealing with ASCII characters the automatic conversion will save you from seeing any differences. Once you start using characters that are not in ASCII, you will start getting UnicodeError and UnicodeWarning as the automatic conversions between the types fail:

>>> "I am an ñ" == u"I am an ñ"
__main__:1: UnicodeWarning: Unicode equal comparison failed to convert both arguments to Unicode - interpreting them as being unequal
False

Why do these conversions fail? The reason is that the python2 unicode type represents an abstract sequence of unicode text known as code points. str, on the other hand, really represents a sequence of bytes. Those bytes are converted by your operating system to appear as characters on your screen using a particular encoding (usually with a default defined by the operating system and customizable by the individual user.) Although ASCII characters are fairly standard in what bytes represent each character, the bytes outside of the ASCII range are not. In general, each encoding will map a different character to a particular byte. Newer encodings map individual characters to multiple bytes (which the older encodings will instead treat as multiple characters). In the face of these differences, python refuses to guess at an encoding and instead issues a warning or exception and refuses to convert.

See also

Overcoming frustration: Correctly using unicode in python2

For a longer introduction on this subject.

Strategy for Explicit Conversion

So what is the best method of dealing with this weltering babble of incoherent encodings? The basic strategy is to explicitly turn everything into unicode when it first enters your program. Then, when you send it to output, you can transform the unicode back into bytes. Doing this allows you to control the encodings that are used and avoid getting tracebacks due to UnicodeError. Using the functions defined in this module, that looks something like this:

 1>>> from kitchen.text.converters import to_unicode, to_bytes
 2>>> name = raw_input('Enter your name: ')
 3Enter your name: Toshio くらとみ
 4>>> name
 5'Toshio \xe3\x81\x8f\xe3\x82\x89\xe3\x81\xa8\xe3\x81\xbf'
 6>>> type(name)
 7<type 'str'>
 8>>> unicode_name = to_unicode(name)
 9>>> type(unicode_name)
10<type 'unicode'>
11>>> unicode_name
12u'Toshio \u304f\u3089\u3068\u307f'
13>>> # Do a lot of other things before needing to save/output again:
14>>> output = open('datafile', 'w')
15>>> output.write(to_bytes(u'Name: %s\\n' % unicode_name))

A few notes:

Looking at line 6, you’ll notice that the input we took from the user was a byte str. In general, anytime we’re getting a value from outside of python (The filesystem, reading data from the network, interacting with an external command, reading values from the environment) we are interacting with something that will want to give us a byte str. Some python standard library modules and third party libraries will automatically attempt to convert a byte str to unicode strings for you. This is both a boon and a curse. If the library can guess correctly about the encoding that the data is in, it will return unicode objects to you without you having to convert. However, if it can’t guess correctly, you may end up with one of several problems:

UnicodeError

The library attempted to decode a byte str into a unicode, string failed, and raises an exception.

Garbled data

If the library returns the data after decoding it with the wrong encoding, the characters you see in the unicode string won’t be the ones that you expect.

A byte str instead of unicode string

Some libraries will return a unicode string when they’re able to decode the data and a byte str when they can’t. This is generally the hardest problem to debug when it occurs. Avoid it in your own code and try to avoid or open bugs against upstreams that do this. See Designing Unicode Aware APIs for strategies to do this properly.

On line 8, we convert from a byte str to a unicode string. to_unicode() does this for us. It has some error handling and sane defaults that make this a nicer function to use than calling str.decode() directly:

  • Instead of defaulting to the ASCII encoding which fails with all but the simple American English characters, it defaults to UTF-8.

  • Instead of raising an error if it cannot decode a value, it will replace the value with the unicode “Replacement character” symbol (�).

  • If you happen to call this method with something that is not a str or unicode, it will return an empty unicode string.

All three of these can be overridden using different keyword arguments to the function. See the to_unicode() documentation for more information.

On line 15 we push the data back out to a file. Two things you should note here:

  1. We deal with the strings as unicode until the last instant. The string format that we’re using is unicode and the variable also holds unicode. People sometimes get into trouble when they mix a byte str format with a variable that holds a unicode string (or vice versa) at this stage.

  2. to_bytes(), does the reverse of to_unicode(). In this case, we’re using the default values which turn unicode into a byte str using UTF-8. Any errors are replaced with a � and sending nonstring objects yield empty unicode strings. Just like to_unicode(), you can look at the documentation for to_bytes() to find out how to override any of these defaults.

When to use an alternate strategy

The default strategy of decoding to unicode strings when you take data in and encoding to a byte str when you send the data back out works great for most problems but there are a few times when you shouldn’t:

  • The values aren’t meant to be read as text

  • The values need to be byte-for-byte when you send them back out – for instance if they are database keys or filenames.

  • You are transferring the data between several libraries that all expect byte str.

In each of these instances, there is a reason to keep around the byte str version of a value. Here’s a few hints to keep your sanity in these situations:

  1. Keep your unicode and str values separate. Just like the pain caused when you have to use someone else’s library that returns both unicode and str you can cause yourself pain if you have functions that can return both types or variables that could hold either type of value.

  2. Name your variables so that you can tell whether you’re storing byte str or unicode string. One of the first things you end up having to do when debugging is determine what type of string you have in a variable and what type of string you are expecting. Naming your variables consistently so that you can tell which type they are supposed to hold will save you from at least one of those steps.

  3. When you get values initially, make sure that you’re dealing with the type of value that you expect as you save it. You can use isinstance() or to_bytes() since to_bytes() doesn’t do any modifications of the string if it’s already a str. When using to_bytes() for this purpose you might want to use:

    try:
    b_input = to_bytes(input_should_be_bytes_already, errors='strict', nonstring='strict')
except:
    handle_errors_somehow()

    The reason is that the default of to_bytes() will take characters that are illegal in the chosen encoding and transform them to replacement characters. Since the point of keeping this data as a byte str is to keep the exact same bytes when you send it outside of your code, changing things to replacement characters should be rasing red flags that something is wrong. Setting errors to strict will raise an exception which gives you an opportunity to fail gracefully.

  4. Sometimes you will want to print out the values that you have in your byte str. When you do this you will need to make sure that you transform unicode to str before combining them. Also be sure that any other function calls (including gettext) are going to give you strings that are the same type. For instance:

    print to_bytes(_('Username: %(user)s'), 'utf-8') % {'user': b_username}

Gotchas and how to avoid them

Even when you have a good conceptual understanding of how python2 treats unicode and str there are still some things that can surprise you. In most cases this is because, as noted earlier, python or one of the python libraries you depend on is trying to convert a value automatically and failing. Explicit conversion at the appropriate place usually solves that.

str(obj)

One common idiom for getting a simple, string representation of an object is to use:

str(obj)

Unfortunately, this is not safe. Sometimes str(obj) will return unicode. Sometimes it will return a byte str. Sometimes, it will attempt to convert from a unicode string to a byte str, fail, and throw a UnicodeError. To be safe from all of these, first decide whether you need unicode or str to be returned. Then use to_unicode() or to_bytes() to get the simple representation like this:

u_representation = to_unicode(obj, nonstring='simplerepr')
b_representation = to_bytes(obj, nonstring='simplerepr')

print

python has a builtin print() statement that outputs strings to the terminal. This originated in a time when python only dealt with byte str. When unicode strings came about, some enhancements were made to the print() statement so that it could print those as well. The enhancements make print() work most of the time. However, the times when it doesn’t work tend to make for cryptic debugging.

The basic issue is that print() has to figure out what encoding to use when it prints a unicode string to the terminal. When python is attached to your terminal (ie, you’re running the interpreter or running a script that prints to the screen) python is able to take the encoding value from your locale settings LC_ALL or LC_CTYPE and print the characters allowed by that encoding. On most modern Unix systems, the encoding is utf-8 which means that you can print any unicode character without problem.

There are two common cases of things going wrong:

  1. Someone has a locale set that does not accept all valid unicode characters. For instance:

    $ LC_ALL=C python
>>> print u'\ufffd'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ufffd' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

    This often happens when a script that you’ve written and debugged from the terminal is run from an automated environment like cron. It also occurs when you have written a script using a utf-8 aware locale and released it for consumption by people all over the internet. Inevitably, someone is running with a locale that can’t handle all unicode characters and you get a traceback reported.

  2. You redirect output to a file. Python isn’t using the values in LC_ALL unconditionally to decide what encoding to use. Instead it is using the encoding set for the terminal you are printing to which is set to accept different encodings by LC_ALL. If you redirect to a file, you are no longer printing to the terminal so LC_ALL won’t have any effect. At this point, python will decide it can’t find an encoding and fallback to ASCII which will likely lead to UnicodeError being raised. You can see this in a short script:

    #! /usr/bin/python -tt
print u'\ufffd'

    And then look at the difference between running it normally and redirecting to a file:

    $ ./test.py
�
$ ./test.py > t
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 3, in <module>
      print u'\ufffd'
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ufffd' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

The short answer to dealing with this is to always use bytes when writing output. You can do this by explicitly converting to bytes like this:

from kitchen.text.converters import to_bytes
u_string = u'\ufffd'
print to_bytes(u_string)

or you can wrap stdout and stderr with a StreamWriter. A StreamWriter is convenient in that you can assign it to encode for sys.stdout or sys.stderr and then have output automatically converted but it has the drawback of still being able to throw UnicodeError if the writer can’t encode all possible unicode codepoints. Kitchen provides an alternate version which can be retrieved with kitchen.text.converters.getwriter() which will not traceback in its standard configuration.

Unicode, str, and dict keys

The hash() of the ASCII characters is the same for unicode and byte str. When you use them in dict keys, they evaluate to the same dictionary slot:

>>> u_string = u'a'
>>> b_string = 'a'
>>> hash(u_string), hash(b_string)
(12416037344, 12416037344)
>>> d = {}
>>> d[u_string] = 'unicode'
>>> d[b_string] = 'bytes'
>>> d
{u'a': 'bytes'}

When you deal with key values outside of ASCII, unicode and byte str evaluate unequally no matter what their character content or hash value:

>>> u_string = u'ñ'
>>> b_string = u_string.encode('utf-8')
>>> print u_string
ñ
>>> print b_string
ñ
>>> d = {}
>>> d[u_string] = 'unicode'
>>> d[b_string] = 'bytes'
>>> d
{u'\\xf1': 'unicode', '\\xc3\\xb1': 'bytes'}
>>> b_string2 = '\\xf1'
>>> hash(u_string), hash(b_string2)
(30848092528, 30848092528)
>>> d = {}
>>> d[u_string] = 'unicode'
>>> d[b_string2] = 'bytes'
{u'\\xf1': 'unicode', '\\xf1': 'bytes'}

How do you work with this one? Remember rule #1: Keep your unicode and byte str values separate. That goes for keys in a dictionary just like anything else.

  • For any given dictionary, make sure that all your keys are either unicode or str. Do not mix the two. If you’re being given both unicode and str but you don’t need to preserve separate keys for each, I recommend using to_unicode() or to_bytes() to convert all keys to one type or the other like this:

    >>> from kitchen.text.converters import to_unicode
>>> u_string = u'one'
>>> b_string = 'two'
>>> d = {}
>>> d[to_unicode(u_string)] = 1
>>> d[to_unicode(b_string)] = 2
>>> d
{u'two': 2, u'one': 1}

  • These issues also apply to using dicts with tuple keys that contain a mixture of unicode and str. Once again the best fix is to standardise on either str or unicode.

  • If you absolutely need to store values in a dictionary where the keys could be either unicode or str you can use StrictDict which has separate entries for all unicode and byte str and deals correctly with any tuple containing mixed unicode and byte str.

Functions

Unicode and byte str conversion

kitchen.text.converters.to_unicode(obj, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace', nonstring=None, non_string=None)

Convert an object into a str string

Parameters:

  • obj – Object to convert to a str string. This should normally be a byte bytes

  • encoding – What encoding to try converting the byte bytes as. Defaults to utf-8

  • errors – If errors are found while decoding, perform this action. Defaults to replace which replaces the invalid bytes with a character that means the bytes were unable to be decoded. Other values are the same as the error handling schemes in the codec base classes. For instance strict which raises an exception and ignore which simply omits the non-decodable characters.

  • nonstring –

    How to treat nonstring values. Possible values are:

    simplerepr:

    Attempt to call the object’s “simple representation” method and return that value. Python-2.3+ has two methods that try to return a simple representation: object.__unicode__() and object.__str__(). We first try to get a usable value from object.__unicode__(). If that fails we try the same with object.__str__().

    empty:

    Return an empty str string

    strict:

    Raise a TypeError

    passthru:

    Return the object unchanged

    repr:

    Attempt to return a str string of the repr of the object

    Default is simplerepr

  • non_string – Deprecated Use nonstring instead

Raises:

  • TypeError – if nonstring is strict and a non-basestring object is passed in or if nonstring is set to an unknown value

  • UnicodeDecodeError – if errors is strict and obj is not decodable using the given encoding

Returns:

str string or the original object depending on the value of nonstring.

Usually this should be used on a byte bytes but it can take both byte bytes and str strings intelligently. Nonstring objects are handled in different ways depending on the setting of the nonstring parameter.

The default values of this function are set so as to always return a str string and never raise an error when converting from a byte bytes to a str string. However, when you do not pass validly encoded text (or a nonstring object), you may end up with output that you don’t expect. Be sure you understand the requirements of your data, not just ignore errors by passing it through this function.

Changed in version 0.2.1a2: Deprecated non_string in favor of nonstring parameter and changed default value to simplerepr

kitchen.text.converters.to_bytes(obj, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace', nonstring=None, non_string=None)

Convert an object into a byte bytes

Parameters:

  • obj – Object to convert to a byte bytes. This should normally be a str string.

  • encoding – Encoding to use to convert the str string into a byte bytes. Defaults to utf-8.

  • errors –

    If errors are found while encoding, perform this action. Defaults to replace which replaces the invalid bytes with a character that means the bytes were unable to be encoded. Other values are the same as the error handling schemes in the codec base classes. For instance strict which raises an exception and ignore which simply omits the non-encodable characters.

  • nonstring –

    How to treat nonstring values. Possible values are:

    simplerepr:

    Attempt to call the object’s “simple representation” method and return that value. Python-2.3+ has two methods that try to return a simple representation: object.__unicode__() and object.__str__(). We first try to get a usable value from object.__str__(). If that fails we try the same with object.__unicode__().

    empty:

    Return an empty byte bytes

    strict:

    Raise a TypeError

    passthru:

    Return the object unchanged

    repr:

    Attempt to return a byte bytes of the repr() of the object

    Default is simplerepr.

  • non_string – Deprecated Use nonstring instead.

Raises:

  • TypeError – if nonstring is strict and a non-basestring object is passed in or if nonstring is set to an unknown value.

  • UnicodeEncodeError – if errors is strict and all of the bytes of obj are unable to be encoded using encoding.

Returns:

byte bytes or the original object depending on the value of nonstring.

Warning

If you pass a byte bytes into this function the byte bytes is returned unmodified. It is not re-encoded with the specified encoding. The easiest way to achieve that is:

to_bytes(to_unicode(text), encoding='utf-8')

The initial to_unicode() call will ensure text is a str string. Then, to_bytes() will turn that into a byte bytes with the specified encoding.

Usually, this should be used on a str string but it can take either a byte bytes or a str string intelligently. Nonstring objects are handled in different ways depending on the setting of the nonstring parameter.

The default values of this function are set so as to always return a byte bytes and never raise an error when converting from unicode to bytes. However, when you do not pass an encoding that can validly encode the object (or a non-string object), you may end up with output that you don’t expect. Be sure you understand the requirements of your data, not just ignore errors by passing it through this function.

Changed in version 0.2.1a2: Deprecated non_string in favor of nonstring parameter and changed default value to simplerepr

kitchen.text.converters.getwriter(encoding)

Return a codecs.StreamWriter that resists tracing back.

Parameters:

encoding – Encoding to use for transforming str strings into byte bytes.

Return type:

codecs.StreamWriter

Returns:

StreamWriter that you can instantiate to wrap output streams to automatically translate str strings into encoding.

This is a reimplemetation of codecs.getwriter() that returns a StreamWriter that resists issuing tracebacks. The StreamWriter that is returned uses kitchen.text.converters.to_bytes() to convert str strings into byte bytes. The departures from codecs.getwriter() are:

  1. The StreamWriter that is returned will take byte bytes as well as str strings. Any byte bytes will be passed through unmodified.

  2. The default error handler for unknown bytes is to replace the bytes with the unknown character (? in most ascii-based encodings, � in the utf encodings) whereas codecs.getwriter() defaults to strict. Like codecs.StreamWriter, the returned StreamWriter can have its error handler changed in code by setting stream.errors = 'new_handler_name'

Example usage:

$ LC_ALL=C python
>>> import sys
>>> from kitchen.text.converters import getwriter
>>> UTF8Writer = getwriter('utf-8')
>>> unwrapped_stdout = sys.stdout
>>> sys.stdout = UTF8Writer(unwrapped_stdout)
>>> print 'caf\xc3\xa9'
café
>>> print u'caf\xe9'
café
>>> ASCIIWriter = getwriter('ascii')
>>> sys.stdout = ASCIIWriter(unwrapped_stdout)
>>> print 'caf\xc3\xa9'
café
>>> print u'caf\xe9'
caf?

See also

API docs for codecs.StreamWriter and codecs.getwriter() and Print Fails on the python wiki.

Added in version kitchen: 0.2a2, API: kitchen.text 1.1.0

kitchen.text.converters.to_str(obj)

Deprecated

This function converts something to a byte bytes if it isn’t one. It’s used to call str() or unicode() on the object to get its simple representation without danger of getting a UnicodeError. You should be using to_unicode() or to_bytes() explicitly instead.

If you need str strings:

to_unicode(obj, nonstring='simplerepr')

If you need byte bytes:

to_bytes(obj, nonstring='simplerepr')
kitchen.text.converters.to_utf8(obj, errors='replace', non_string='passthru')

Deprecated

Convert str to an encoded utf-8 byte bytes. You should be using to_bytes() instead:

to_bytes(obj, encoding='utf-8', non_string='passthru')

Transformation to XML

kitchen.text.converters.unicode_to_xml(string, encoding='utf-8', attrib=False, control_chars='replace')

Take a str string and turn it into a byte bytes suitable for xml

Parameters:

  • string – str string to encode into an XML compatible byte bytes

  • encoding – encoding to use for the returned byte bytes. Default is to encode to UTF-8. If some of the characters in string are not encodable in this encoding, the unknown characters will be entered into the output string using xml character references.

  • attrib – If True, quote the string for use in an xml attribute. If False (default), quote for use in an xml text field.

  • control_chars –

    control characters are not allowed in XML documents. When we encounter those we need to know what to do. Valid options are:

    replace:

    (default) Replace the control characters with ?

    ignore:

    Remove the characters altogether from the output

    strict:

    Raise an XmlEncodeError when we encounter a control character

Raises:

  • kitchen.text.exceptions.XmlEncodeError – If control_chars is set to strict and the string to be made suitable for output to xml contains control characters or if string is not a str string then we raise this exception.

  • ValueError – If control_chars is set to something other than replace, ignore, or strict.

Return type:

byte bytes

Returns:

representation of the str string as a valid XML byte bytes

XML files consist mainly of text encoded using a particular charset. XML also denies the use of certain bytes in the encoded text (example: ASCII Null). There are also special characters that must be escaped if they are present in the input (example: <). This function takes care of all of those issues for you.

There are a few different ways to use this function depending on your needs. The simplest invocation is like this:

unicode_to_xml(u'String with non-ASCII characters: <"á と">')

This will return the following to you, encoded in utf-8:

'String with non-ASCII characters: &lt;"á と"&gt;'

Pretty straightforward. Now, what if you need to encode your document in something other than utf-8? For instance, latin-1? Let’s see:

unicode_to_xml(u'String with non-ASCII characters: <"á と">', encoding='latin-1')
'String with non-ASCII characters: &lt;"á &#12392;"&gt;'

Because the と character is not available in the latin-1 charset, it is replaced with &#12392; in our output. This is an xml character reference which represents the character at unicode codepoint 12392, the と character.

When you want to reverse this, use xml_to_unicode() which will turn a byte bytes into a str string and replace the xml character references with the unicode characters.

XML also has the quirk of not allowing control characters in its output. The control_chars parameter allows us to specify what to do with those. For use cases that don’t need absolute character by character fidelity (example: holding strings that will just be used for display in a GUI app later), the default value of replace works well:

unicode_to_xml(u'String with disallowed control chars: \u0000\u0007')
'String with disallowed control chars: ??'

If you do need to be able to reproduce all of the characters at a later date (examples: if the string is a key value in a database or a path on a filesystem) you have many choices. Here are a few that rely on utf-7, a verbose encoding that encodes control characters (as well as non-ASCII unicode values) to characters from within the ASCII printable characters. The good thing about doing this is that the code is pretty simple. You just need to use utf-7 both when encoding the field for xml and when decoding it for use in your python program:

unicode_to_xml(u'String with unicode: と and control char: ', encoding='utf7')
'String with unicode: +MGg and control char: +AAc-'
# [...]
xml_to_unicode('String with unicode: +MGg and control char: +AAc-', encoding='utf7')
u'String with unicode: と and control char: '

As you can see, the utf-7 encoding will transform even characters that would be representable in utf-8. This can be a drawback if you want unicode characters in the file to be readable without being decoded first. You can work around this with increased complexity in your application code:

encoding = 'utf-8'
u_string = u'String with unicode: と and control char: '
try:
    # First attempt to encode to utf8
    data = unicode_to_xml(u_string, encoding=encoding, errors='strict')
except XmlEncodeError:
    # Fallback to utf-7
    encoding = 'utf-7'
    data = unicode_to_xml(u_string, encoding=encoding, errors='strict')
write_tag('<mytag encoding=%s>%s</mytag>' % (encoding, data))
# [...]
encoding = tag.attributes.encoding
u_string = xml_to_unicode(u_string, encoding=encoding)

Using code similar to that, you can have some fields encoded using your default encoding and fallback to utf-7 if there are control characters present.

Note

If your goal is to preserve the control characters you cannot save the entire file as utf-7 and set the xml encoding parameter to utf-7 if your goal is to preserve the control characters. Because XML doesn’t allow control characters, you have to encode those separate from any encoding work that the XML parser itself knows about.

See also

bytes_to_xml()

if you’re dealing with bytes that are non-text or of an unknown encoding that you must preserve on a byte for byte level.

guess_encoding_to_xml()

if you’re dealing with strings in unknown encodings that you don’t need to save with char-for-char fidelity.

kitchen.text.converters.xml_to_unicode(byte_string, encoding='utf-8', errors='replace')

Transform a byte bytes from an xml file into a str string

Parameters:

  • byte_string – byte bytes to decode

  • encoding – encoding that the byte bytes is in

  • errors – What to do if not every character is valid in encoding. See the to_unicode() documentation for legal values.

Return type:

str string

Returns:

string decoded from byte_string

This function attempts to reverse what unicode_to_xml() does. It takes a byte bytes (presumably read in from an xml file) and expands all the html entities into unicode characters and decodes the byte bytes into a str string. One thing it cannot do is restore any control characters that were removed prior to inserting into the file. If you need to keep such characters you need to use xml_to_bytes() and bytes_to_xml() or use on of the strategies documented in unicode_to_xml() instead.

kitchen.text.converters.byte_string_to_xml(byte_string, input_encoding='utf-8', errors='replace', output_encoding='utf-8', attrib=False, control_chars='replace')

Make sure a byte bytes is validly encoded for xml output

Parameters:

  • byte_string – Byte bytes to turn into valid xml output

  • input_encoding – Encoding of byte_string. Default utf-8

  • errors –

    How to handle errors encountered while decoding the byte_string into str at the beginning of the process. Values are:

    replace:

    (default) Replace the invalid bytes with a ?

    ignore:

    Remove the characters altogether from the output

    strict:

    Raise an UnicodeDecodeError when we encounter a non-decodable character

  • output_encoding – Encoding for the xml file that this string will go into. Default is utf-8. If all the characters in byte_string are not encodable in this encoding, the unknown characters will be entered into the output string using xml character references.

  • attrib – If True, quote the string for use in an xml attribute. If False (default), quote for use in an xml text field.

  • control_chars –

    XML does not allow control characters. When we encounter those we need to know what to do. Valid options are:

    replace:

    (default) Replace the control characters with ?

    ignore:

    Remove the characters altogether from the output

    strict:

    Raise an error when we encounter a control character

Raises:

  • XmlEncodeError – If control_chars is set to strict and the string to be made suitable for output to xml contains control characters then we raise this exception.

  • UnicodeDecodeError – If errors is set to strict and the byte_string contains bytes that are not decodable using input_encoding, this error is raised

Return type:

byte bytes

Returns:

representation of the byte bytes in the output encoding with any bytes that aren’t available in xml taken care of.

Use this when you have a byte bytes representing text that you need to make suitable for output to xml. There are several cases where this is the case. For instance, if you need to transform some strings encoded in latin-1 to utf-8 for output:

utf8_string = byte_string_to_xml(latin1_string, input_encoding='latin-1')

If you already have strings in the proper encoding you may still want to use this function to remove control characters:

cleaned_string = byte_string_to_xml(string, input_encoding='utf-8', output_encoding='utf-8')

See also

unicode_to_xml()

for other ideas on using this function

kitchen.text.converters.xml_to_byte_string(byte_string, input_encoding='utf-8', errors='replace', output_encoding='utf-8')

Transform a byte bytes from an xml file into str string

Parameters:

  • byte_string – byte bytes to decode

  • input_encoding – encoding that the byte bytes is in

  • errors – What to do if not every character is valid in encoding. See the to_unicode() docstring for legal values.

  • output_encoding – Encoding for the output byte bytes

Returns:

str string decoded from byte_string

This function attempts to reverse what unicode_to_xml() does. It takes a byte bytes (presumably read in from an xml file) and expands all the html entities into unicode characters and decodes the byte bytes into a str string. One thing it cannot do is restore any control characters that were removed prior to inserting into the file. If you need to keep such characters you need to use xml_to_bytes() and bytes_to_xml() or use one of the strategies documented in unicode_to_xml() instead.

kitchen.text.converters.bytes_to_xml(byte_string, *args, **kwargs)

Return a byte bytes encoded so it is valid inside of any xml file

Parameters:

  • byte_string – byte bytes to transform

  • **kwargs (*args,) –

    extra arguments to this function are passed on to the function actually implementing the encoding. You can use this to tweak the output in some cases but, as a general rule, you shouldn’t because the underlying encoding function is not guaranteed to remain the same.

Return type:

byte bytes consisting of all ASCII characters

Returns:

byte bytes representation of the input. This will be encoded using base64.

This function is made especially to put binary information into xml documents.

This function is intended for encoding things that must be preserved byte-for-byte. If you want to encode a byte string that’s text and don’t mind losing the actual bytes you probably want to try byte_string_to_xml() or guess_encoding_to_xml() instead.

Note

Although the current implementation uses base64.b64encode() and there’s no plans to change it, that isn’t guaranteed. If you want to make sure that you can encode and decode these messages it’s best to use xml_to_bytes() if you use this function to encode.

kitchen.text.converters.xml_to_bytes(byte_string, *args, **kwargs)

Decode a string encoded using bytes_to_xml()

Parameters:

  • byte_string – byte bytes to transform. This should be a base64 encoded sequence of bytes originally generated by bytes_to_xml().

  • **kwargs (*args,) –

    extra arguments to this function are passed on to the function actually implementing the encoding. You can use this to tweak the output in some cases but, as a general rule, you shouldn’t because the underlying encoding function is not guaranteed to remain the same.

Return type:

byte bytes

Returns:

byte bytes that’s the decoded input

If you’ve got fields in an xml document that were encoded with bytes_to_xml() then you want to use this function to undecode them. It converts a base64 encoded string into a byte bytes.

Note

Although the current implementation uses base64.b64decode() and there’s no plans to change it, that isn’t guaranteed. If you want to make sure that you can encode and decode these messages it’s best to use bytes_to_xml() if you use this function to decode.

kitchen.text.converters.guess_encoding_to_xml(string, output_encoding='utf-8', attrib=False, control_chars='replace')

Return a byte bytes suitable for inclusion in xml

Parameters:

  • string – str or byte bytes to be transformed into a byte bytes suitable for inclusion in xml. If string is a byte bytes we attempt to guess the encoding. If we cannot guess, we fallback to latin-1.

  • output_encoding – Output encoding for the byte bytes. This should match the encoding of your xml file.

  • attrib – If True, escape the item for use in an xml attribute. If False (default) escape the item for use in a text node.

Returns:

utf-8 encoded byte bytes

kitchen.text.converters.to_xml(string, encoding='utf-8', attrib=False, control_chars='ignore')

Deprecated: Use guess_encoding_to_xml() instead

Working with exception messages

kitchen.text.converters.EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS = (<function <lambda>>, <function <lambda>>)
Tuple of functions to try to use to convert an exception into a string

representation. Its main use is to extract a string (str or bytes) from an exception object in exception_to_unicode() and exception_to_bytes(). The functions here will try the exception’s args[0] and the exception itself (roughly equivalent to str(exception)) to extract the message. This is only a default and can be easily overridden when calling those functions. There are several reasons you might wish to do that. If you have exceptions where the best string representing the exception is not returned by the default functions, you can add another function to extract from a different field:

from kitchen.text.converters import (EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS,
        exception_to_unicode)

class MyError(Exception):
    def __init__(self, message):
        self.value = message

c = [lambda e: e.value]
c.extend(EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS)
try:
    raise MyError('An Exception message')
except MyError, e:
    print exception_to_unicode(e, converters=c)

Another reason would be if you’re converting to a byte bytes and you know the bytes needs to be a non-utf-8 encoding. exception_to_bytes() defaults to utf-8 but if you convert into a byte bytes explicitly using a converter then you can choose a different encoding:

from kitchen.text.converters import (EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS,
        exception_to_bytes, to_bytes)
c = [lambda e: to_bytes(e.args[0], encoding='euc_jp'),
        lambda e: to_bytes(e, encoding='euc_jp')]
c.extend(EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS)
try:
    do_something()
except Exception, e:
    log = open('logfile.euc_jp', 'a')
    log.write('%s
‘ % exception_to_bytes(e, converters=c)

log.close()

Each function in this list should take the exception as its sole argument and return a string containing the message representing the exception. The functions may return the message as a :byte class:bytes, a str string, or even an object if you trust the object to return a decent string representation. The exception_to_unicode() and exception_to_bytes() functions will make sure to convert the string to the proper type before returning.

Added in version 0.2.2.

kitchen.text.converters.BYTE_EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS = (<function <lambda>>, <function to_bytes>)

Deprecated: Use EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS instead.

Tuple of functions to try to use to convert an exception into a string representation. This tuple is similar to the one in EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS but it’s used with exception_to_bytes() instead. Ideally, these functions should do their best to return the data as a byte bytes but the results will be run through to_bytes() before being returned.

Added in version 0.2.2.

Changed in version 1.0.1: Deprecated as simplifications allow EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS to perform the same function.

kitchen.text.converters.exception_to_unicode(exc, converters=(<function <lambda>>, <function <lambda>>))

Convert an exception object into a unicode representation

Parameters:

  • exc – Exception object to convert

  • converters – List of functions to use to convert the exception into a string. See EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS for the default value and an example of adding other converters to the defaults. The functions in the list are tried one at a time to see if they can extract a string from the exception. The first one to do so without raising an exception is used.

Returns:

str string representation of the exception. The value extracted by the converters will be converted into str before being returned using the utf-8 encoding. If you know you need to use an alternate encoding add a function that does that to the list of functions in converters)

Added in version 0.2.2.

kitchen.text.converters.exception_to_bytes(exc, converters=(<function <lambda>>, <function <lambda>>))

Convert an exception object into a str representation

Parameters:

  • exc – Exception object to convert

  • converters – List of functions to use to convert the exception into a string. See EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS for the default value and an example of adding other converters to the defaults. The functions in the list are tried one at a time to see if they can extract a string from the exception. The first one to do so without raising an exception is used.

Returns:

byte bytes representation of the exception. The value extracted by the converters will be converted into bytes before being returned using the utf-8 encoding. If you know you need to use an alternate encoding add a function that does that to the list of functions in converters)

Added in version 0.2.2.

Changed in version 1.0.1: Code simplification allowed us to switch to using EXCEPTION_CONVERTERS as the default value of converters.