python: extended ASCII codes

Question

Hi I want to know how I can append and then print extended ASCII codes in python. I have the following.

code = chr(247)

li = []
li.append(code)
print li

The result python print out is ['\xf7'] when it should be a division symbol. If I simple print code directly "print code" then I get the division symbol but not if I append it to a list. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You probably want the charmap encoding, which lets you turn unicode into bytes without 'magic' conversions.

s='\xf7'
b=s.encode('charmap')
with open('/dev/stdout','wb') as f:
    f.write(b)
    f.flush()

Will print ÷ on my system.

Note that 'extended ASCII' refers to any of a number of proprietary extensions to ASCII, none of which were ever officially adopted and all of which are incompatible with each other. As a result, the symbol output by that code will vary based on the controlling terminal's choice of how to interpret it.

Answer 2

When you print a list, it outputs the default representation of all its elements - ie by calling repr() on each of them. The repr() of a string is its escaped code, by design. If you want to output all the elements of the list properly you should convert it to a string, eg via ', '.join(li).

Note that as those in the comments have stated, there isn't really any such thing as "extended ASCII", there are just various different encodings.