byte count unicode string

[willie]

>You initially asked "What's the correct way to get the byte countof a
>unicode (UTF-8) string".
>
>It appears you meant "How can I find how many bytes there are in the
>UTF-8 representation of a Unicode string without manifesting the UTF-8
>representation?".
>
>The answer is, "You can't", and the rationale would have to be that
>nobody thought of a use case for counting the length of the UTF-8 form
>but not creating the UTF-8 form. What is your use case?

# Sorry for the confusion. My use case is a web app that
# only deals with UTF-8 strings. I want to prevent silent
# truncation of the data, so I want to validate the number
# of bytes that make up the unicode string before sending
# it to the database to be written.

# For instance, say I have a name column that is varchar(50).
# The 50 is in bytes not characters. So I can't use the length of
# the unicode string to check if it's over the maximum allowed bytes.

name = post.input('name') # utf-8 string

# preferable
if bytes(name) > 50:
send_http_headers()
display_page_begin()
display_error_msg('the name is too long')
display_form(name)
display_page_end()

# If I have a form with many input elements,
# I have to convert each to a byte string
# before i can see how many bytes make up the
# unicode string. That's very memory inefficient
# with large text fields - having to duplicate each
# one to get its size in bytes:

buf = name.encode('UTF-8')
num_bytes = len(buf)


# That said, I'm not losing any sleep over it,
# so feel free to disregard any of this if it's
# way off base.

 

[John Machin]

# Sorry for the confusion. My use case is a web app that
# only deals with UTF-8 strings. I want to prevent silent
# truncation of the data, so I want to validate the number
# of bytes that make up the unicode string before sending
# it to the database to be written.

# For instance, say I have a name column that is varchar(50).
# The 50 is in bytes not characters. So I can't use the length of
# the unicode string to check if it's over the maximum allowed bytes.

What is the database API expecting to get as an arg: a Python unicode
object, or a Python str (8-bit, presumably encoded in utf-8) ?

name = post.input('name') # utf-8 string

You are confusing the hell out of yourself. You say that your web app
deals only with UTF-8 strings. Where do you get "the unicode string"
from??? If name is a utf-8 string, as your comment says, then len(name)
is all you need!!!

*PLEASE* print type(name), repr(name) so that we can see what type it
is!!
If it says the type is str, then it's an 8-bit string, (presumably)
encoded in utf-8.
If it says the type is unicode, then please explain "web app that only
deals with UTF-8 strings" ...

# preferable
if bytes(name) > 50:
send_http_headers()
display_page_begin()
display_error_msg('the name is too long')
display_form(name)
display_page_end()

# If I have a form with many input elements,
# I have to convert each to a byte string
# before i can see how many bytes make up the
# unicode string. That's very memory inefficient
# with large text fields - having to duplicate each
# one to get its size in bytes:

They'd be garbage collected unless you worked very hard to hang on to
them. How large is "large"?