Printing characters that are not in ASCII 0-127 (Python 3)

Question

So, I've got an algorithm whereby I take a character, take its character code, increase that code by a variable, and then print that new character. However, I'd also like it to work for characters not in the default ASCII table. Currently it's not printing 'special' characters like € (for example). How can I make it print certain special characters?

#!/usr/bin/python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

def generateKey(name):

    i = 0
    result = ""

    for char in name:

        newOrd = ord(char) + i
        newChar = chr(newOrd)
        print(newChar)

        result += newChar

        i += 1

    print("Serial key for name: ", result)

generateKey(input("Enter name: "))

Whenever I give an input that forces special characters (like |||||), it works fine for the first four characters (including DEL where it gives the transparent rectangle icon), but the fifth character (meant to be €) is also an error char, which is not what I want. How can I fix this?

Here's the output from |||||:

Enter name: |||||
|
}
~


Serial key for name:  |}~

But the last char should be €, not a blank. (BTW the fourth char, DEL, becomes a transparent rectangle when I copy it into Windows)

No, it's literally not printing. I forgot the output, sorry. — Jack Bashford, May 05 '20 at 00:43
That's better, it's a more complete description of the problem. I don't know if it's enough to solve it though. If you print `repr(result)` what do you get? Maybe your console can't handle that character or uses a font that's missing it. — Mark Ransom, May 05 '20 at 02:41

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 05 '20 at 02:29

1

In the default encoding (utf-8), chr(128) is not the euro symbol. It's a control character. See this Unicode table. So indeed it should be blank, not €.

You can verify the default encoding with sys.getdefaultencoding().

If you want to reinterpret chr(128) as the euro symbol, you should use the windows-1252 encoding. There, it is indeed the euro symbol. (Different encodings disagree on how to represent values beyond ASCII's 0–127.)

answered May 05 '20 at 02:29

Arya McCarthy

8,554
4
34
56

There are online references that do indeed claim that U+0100 is the Euro symbol. Unicode uses the Latin-1 character set for its first 256 codepoints, and windows-1252 is a superset of that. – Mark Ransom May 05 '20 at 02:44
Thank you! I didn't get that it was a windows-style encoding (the program runs in windows) – Jack Bashford May 05 '20 at 02:48
Even in latin1, [it's a control character](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1#Code_page_layout). Below, it says that Windows-1252 reassigns those to printable characters. – Arya McCarthy May 05 '20 at 15:49
I wish I knew where to find an official list of Unicode codepoints, because there's inconsistency in the ones on the web. There's not even agreement on what is in ISO-8859-1. – Mark Ransom May 05 '20 at 15:58

Printing characters that are not in ASCII 0-127 (Python 3)

1 Answers1