UniCode

computer-text-internationalization standard

I'm not quite clear on whether you should use UniCode and UTF as different terms

• apparently UTF-8 was invented in 1992 at a coffee shop around the corner from my old high school by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, which isn't shocking since that's near Murray Hill Bell Labs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

Python encoding/decoding

• WikiGraph scraping uses page_text = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', page_text).encode('ascii','ignore')
  • https://docs.python.org/2/library/unicodedata.html#unicodedata.normalize
  • but I think there's something nicer...
• Unicode Zen in Python 2.x - The Long Version