Test for substrings with diacritics in strings

Question

I'm testing in Python if certain string contains something as follows

if substr in str:
  do_something()

The problem is when substr contains letter with diacritics and other non usual characters. How would you recommend to do tests with such letters?

thank you

perhaps update your question with an example to showcase the problem? — Fredrik Pihl, Sep 20 '11 at 14:16
but as @Rafal states, it *just* works. what doesn't work for you? — Fredrik Pihl, Sep 20 '11 at 14:22

Rafał Dowgird · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-20T14:39:42.820

2

I do not know of any problems specific to diacritics in Python. The following works for me:

 u"ł" in u"źdźbło"
 >>> True

Edit:

u"ł" in u"źdźblo"
>>> False

The matching is exact. If diacritics-insensitive matching is what you want, specify this in your question and see Fredrik's answer.

Edit2: Yes, for string literals containing non-ascii chars you need to specify the encoding in the source file. Something like this should work:

# coding: utf-8

edited Sep 20 '11 at 14:39

answered Sep 20 '11 at 14:15

Rafał Dowgird

Dowgird : And what if I want to test `in title`? can I write `in u"title`? – xralf Sep 20 '11 at 14:22
this writes `SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc5' in file fds on line 67, but no encoding declared; see http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0263.html for details` – xralf Sep 20 '11 at 14:28

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

0

Use the solution outlined in this SO post to remove all diacritics prior to the testing.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:03

Community

answered Sep 20 '11 at 14:14

Fredrik Pihl

2 Answers2