New Note 43

Another reason which I ran across <em>just now</em> is that some software packages refuse to outputting escaped characters.

Case in point: I'm trying to use Python to generate a JSON (ie, Javascript-syntax) array which contains a transliteration scheme called Velthuis. The scheme holds rules like this:

<code>AA Ā</code>

The library I used (because it was sitting around, maybe there's something better now) is called <code>simplejson</code>. Here's what happened:

<pre>
<code>
>>> v = {} # velthuis transliteration dictionary
>>> v[u'AA'] = u'Ā'  # putting a single pair to test
>>> print v.items() 
[(u'AA', u'\u0100')]
>>> # Python wants to send an escape to the terminal, and... 
>>> print simplejson.dumps( v.items())
[["AA", "\u0100"]]
>>> # So does simplejson's "dump string" function <code>dumps()</code>. What happens if if we use <code>dump()</code> instead, which will write to a file, which we can specify as utf-8 encoded?
>>> import codecs
>>> utf8_filepointer = codecs.open('doesitescape.log', mode='w', encoding='utf-8')
>>> simplejson.dump(v.items(), utf8_filepointer)
>>> # Okay, that worked...


[1]+  Stopped                 python
pat@gobaith:~/Desktop/tipitaka/velthuis$ cat doesitescape.log 
[["AA", "\u0100"]]
</code>
</pre>