One of the challenges of working with MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico is handling Unicode and ASCII characters, which are used to represent text in different languages and scripts. In this blog post, we will explore how to work with Unicode and ASCII characters in MicroPython on Raspberry Pi Pico.
By understanding how to work with Unicode and ASCII characters in MicroPython, you can write programs that handle text from different languages and scripts, and interact with other systems that use ASCII encoding.
Unicode and ASCII
Unicode is a standard for encoding characters and text in a way that is compatible with all writing systems and languages. It includes more than 100,000 characters from scripts around the world, including Latin, Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Unicode characters are represented using a numerical code point that uniquely identifies each character.
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a subset of Unicode that includes 128 characters, including the English alphabet, digits, and some symbols. ASCII was originally developed for telecommunication and is still widely used in computing today.
Working with Unicode and ASCII in MicroPython
In MicroPython, text strings are represented using Unicode. This means that you can work with characters from any script or language, including those that are not included in ASCII. However, you may encounter situations where you need to convert between Unicode and ASCII, or work with ASCII characters directly.
To convert a Unicode string to ASCII in MicroPython, you can use the encode() method. This method takes a string and an encoding type as arguments and returns a bytes object that represents the string in the specified encoding. For example, to convert a Unicode string to ASCII, you can use the following code:
unicode_string = "Hello, world!"
ascii_bytes = unicode_string.encode("ascii")To convert an ASCII string to Unicode in MicroPython, you can use the decode() method. This method takes a bytes object and an encoding type as arguments and returns a string that represents the bytes in the specified encoding. For example, to convert an ASCII string to Unicode, you can use the following code:
ascii_bytes = b"Hello, world!"
unicode_string = ascii_bytes.decode("ascii")In some cases, you may need to work with ASCII characters directly, even if your text string is encoded in Unicode. To do this, you can use the ord() function, which takes a character as an argument and returns its ASCII code point. For example, to get the ASCII code point for the letter “A”, you can use the following code:
ascii_code_point = ord("A")Similarly, to convert an ASCII code point to a character, you can use the chr() function, which takes an ASCII code point as an argument and returns the corresponding character. For example, to get the character for the ASCII code point 65 (which represents the letter “A”), you can use the following code:
character = chr(65)
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