Talk:Python Concepts/Strings

BEL is a bullet not a sound?

I remember when it was a big deal that a computer could make a noise, such as the BEL sound. It's no big deal, but my computer produces >>> print('\7') and >>> print('\a') as bullets not bells.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 00:34, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

How strange, it makes a sound on my Windows 8 (not the original DOS sound, the new 'hey something happened' sound). I'll test it on an XP and 7 later this week. Some versions don't support the BEL, (64-bit editions of vista and/or 7, I can't remember). I hope this helps. --I8086 (discuss • contribs) 01:13, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

I will not be taking my laptop to the tech people to get that fixed. In high school (1968) we read in a book that desert Bedouins were more fascinated by the telephone than the radio because seeing the wire added to the mystery. The old BEL of the sixties told people that computers were just like typewriters, except the programmer could decide when the bell rings.--Guy vandegrift (discuss • contribs) 08:06, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

They may have done away with the BEL these days, but some computer keyboards make quite a ruckus all on there own (which might actually be a good thing...).

On a side note, I believe the BEL sound comes the computer itself, not the external speakers, so a lot of laptops don't support the sound, although some laptops do support the sound via their built-in speakers. That's consistence for ya. --I8086 (discuss • contribs) 14:30, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Escape Characters and Escape Sequences

In this section the text repeatedly uses "escape character" when referring to escape sequences. (However there is a table with the correct heading "Escape Sequence", so that I wonder if it has been copied without attribution.) Judging by that table, there is (as I would expect) only one escape character in Python, the backslash. I have in mind to correct the whole section, replacing "character" with "sequence" as required, but also adding clarification of the meaning of the two phrases. If someone with more expertise does it first, I'll be relieved.--Alkhowarizmi (discuss • contribs) 12:02, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Reading on, I find a good example of why I prefer to leave this to "someone with more expertise" (which could be me after further learning). It seems that the r prefix is also an escape character, but I'm not sure at this stage.--Alkhowarizmi (discuss • contribs) 01:51, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Character Encoding

(Once again I'm raising an issue but passing the buck as I don't think I have the required expertise. I've several times had encoding-related problems and struggled to make sense of the confusing world of character encoding - it's not too hard to find the info on the encoding scheme, i.e. the binary representations of characters, but practical implementations are a different story.)

This section refers to Unicode as encoding, in particular as default encoding in Python 3. Unicode is the current widely accepted standard for character encoding, and has specifications for various different encoding schemes, one of which is UTF-8, the default in Python 3 (and Linux and most of the Web). I'm not sure whether the references to Unicode are technically wrong, but at best they leave it equally likely that Python uses, e.g, UTF-16 rather than UTF-8. If the aim is to avoid these complications and keep it simple, wouldn't it be better to say UTF-8 everywhere rather than the more general, hence vague, Unicode?--Alkhowarizmi (discuss • contribs) 08:14, 6 April 2016 (UTC)