python-2.x

I still do not understand completely how python's unicode and str types work. Note: I am working in Python 2, as far as I know Python 3 has a completely different approach to the same issue. What I know : str is an older beast that saves strings encoded by one of the way too many encodings that history has forced us to work with. unicode is an more standardised way of representing strings using a huge table of all possible characters, emojis, little pictures of dog poop and so on. The decode function transforms strings to unicode, encode does the other way around. If I, in python's shell,

Here is an example: d = dict(a = 2) print d {'a': 2} How can I tell dict() constructor to use Unicode instead without writing the string literal expliclity like u'a' ? I am loading a dictionary from a json module which defaults to use unicode. I want to make use of unicode from now on. To get a dict with Unicode keys, use Unicode strings when constructing the dict: >>> d = {u'a': 2} >>> d {u'a': 2} Dicts created from keyword arguments always have string keys. If you want those to be Unicode (as well as all other strings), switch to Python 3. Keyword arguments in 2.x can only use ASCII

Is there a cleaner way to modify some parts of a URL in Python 2? For example http://foo/bar -> http://foo/yah At present, I'm doing this: import urlparse url = 'http://foo/bar' # Modify path component of URL from 'bar' to 'yah' # Use nasty convert-to-list hack due to urlparse.ParseResult being immutable parts = list(urlparse.urlparse(url)) parts[2] = 'yah' url = urlparse.urlunparse(parts) Is there a cleaner solution? Martijn Pieters Unfortunately, the documentation is out of date; the results produced by urlparse.urlparse() (and urlparse.urlsplit() ) use a collections.namedtuple() -produced