rotunicode

RotUnicode is a Python codec that can convert a string of ASCII characters to a Unicode string with non-ASCII characters maintaining readability.

>>> import codecs
>>> codecs.register(RotUnicode.search_function)
>>> 'Hello World!'.encode('rotunicode')
Ĥȅľľő Ŵőŕľď!
>>> 'Ĥȅľľő Ŵőŕľď!'.decode('rotunicode')
Hello World!

RotUnicode is extremely helpful in testing your application because it makes it easy to create strings with non-ASCII characters. Example -

>>> import os, errno
>>> name = 'foo'.encode('rotunicode')
>>> os.mkdir(name)
>>> print(name)
ƒőő
>>> os.path.exists(name)
True
>>> os.statvfs(name)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-2:
ordinal not in range(128)

This bug is filed at http://bugs.python.org/issue18695.

Supported Characters

RotUnicode converts lower case and upper case characters of the English alphabet and digits 0 to 9 to non-ASCII characters. All characters that are outside this range are left as is.

>>> 'हेलो World!'.encode('rotunicode')
हेलो Ŵőŕľď!
>>> 'हेलो Ŵőŕľď!'.decode('rotunicode')
हेलो World!

Installation

To install, simply:

pip install rotunicode

Contribute

See CONTRIBUTING.

Setup

Create a virtual environment and install packages:

mkvirtualenv rotunicode
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Testing

Run all tests using:

tox

The tox tests include code style checks via pep8 and pylint.

Why is this named RotUnicode?

RotUnicode stands for rotate-to-unicode. Or rotten-unicode for those who have nightmares about Unicode. It was inspired by Rot13.

Copyright and License

Copyright 2014 Box, Inc. All rights reserved.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

  http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.