How to handle multibyte string in Python

Question

There are multibyte string functions in PHP to handle multibyte string (e.g:CJK script). For example, I want to count how many letters in a multi bytes string by using

Answer 1

Use Unicode strings:

# Encoding: UTF-8

japanese = u"桜の花びらたち"
print japanese
print len(japanese)

Note the u in front of the string.

To convert a bytestring into Unicode, use decode: "桜の花びらたち".decode('utf-8')