Tag: string-literals

Where does "\N{SPECIAL CHARACTER}" in Python come from?

I started to feel comfortable with Python until I came across some urwid tutorial, which included an example with code such as this:

...
main = urwid.Padding(menu(u'Pythons', choices), left=2, right=2)
top = urwid.Overlay(main, urwid.SolidFill(u'\N{MEDIUM SHADE}'),
    align='center', width=('relative', 60),
    valign='middle', height=('relative', 60),
    min_width=20, min_height=9)
urwid.MainLoop(top, palette=[('reversed', 'standout', '')]).run()

That u'\N{MEDIUM SHADE}' string literal drove me nuts for almost the entire day until I found out it was included — as comments! — in files under /usr/lib/python3.5/encodings/… But nowhere did I find any hint as to using such a notation. I browsed Python documentation and could find nothing. Not even a clue!

Now I feel like a n00b. Again. For I imagine there’s many more features that I missed like this… out of being mentioned nowhere — or at least in no obvious and remarkable place.

Out of curiosity I ran in my python interpreter:

print(u'\N{LOWER ONE QUARTER BLOCK}')

and I got

▂

Where does that kind of black magic come from? I mean, where is it explained one can use that… notation (?) to print out special characters using their friendly names? Does Python hide any other surprises like this one?

Solution:

Towards the end of https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#string-and-bytes-literals:

\N{name} – Character named name in the Unicode database