#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# The comment up above lets me type utf-8 characters in this file.

# -------

# See
#    * wikipedia
#       character encodings
#       utf-8
#    * articles & python docs
#       http://docs.python.org/tut/node5.html
#       http://docs.python.org/ref/strings.html
#       http://www.jorendorff.com/articles/unicode/python.html
#    * google "python unicode" or "python utf-8"
#    * list of characters 
#       http://www.utf8-chartable.de/

# What you need to know :
#   (1) Put the coding comment at the top of the file.
#   (2) Type strings or chars as u"..."
#   (3) Type funky characters as
#       - the funky char itself, pasted from a special editor
#       - \uxxxx       where xxxx is a 16-bit hex value
#       - \Uxxxxxxxx   where xxxxxxxx is a 32-bit hex value
#       - \N{name}     for the character with that name, for example
#                      RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
#   (4) Open files with codecs.open
#   (5) Convert text from one code to another with text.encode('codec-name')

# --------

import codecs

# This is a unicode string.
text = u" Ándre says (α, β, γ, δ )"

print "text:", text
print "text as utf-8:", text.encode('utf-8')
# print "text as latin-1:", text.encode('latin-1')  # gives an error

# This opens a file for reading/writing in utf-8 encoding.
filename = 'from_python.txt'
print "writing text to", filename
file = codecs.open(filename, 'w', 'utf-8')
file.write(text)
file.close()