Track 7 · Lesson 10 of 11

Unicode and encodings

Understand characters as Unicode code points, convert between text and bytes with UTF-8, and compare text reliably with normalisation and case-folding.

You will be able to

• Explain the difference between a character, its code point and its bytes, using ord(), chr() and unicodedata.name()
• Encode text to bytes and decode bytes to text with UTF-8, and handle encoding errors deliberately
• Explain why len() of a string and of its bytes differ for accented letters and Arabic
• Normalise text with unicodedata.normalize() so that visually identical strings compare equal, and strip accents or Arabic diacritics for searching
• Compare text case-insensitively across languages with casefold()