KOI8-R: Having trouble translating a string

Question

This Python script gets translit for Russian letters:

s = u'Код Обмена Информацией, 8 бит'.encode('koi8-r')
print ''.join([chr(ord(c) & 0x7F) for c in s]) # kOD oBMENA iNFORMACIEJ, 8 BIT

That works. But I want to modify it so as to get user input. Now I'm stuck at this:

s = raw_input("Enter a string you want to translit: ")

s = unicode(s)
s = s.encode('koi8-r')

print ''.join([chr(ord(c) & 0x7F) for c in s])

Ending up with this:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xef in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

What's wrong?

Answer 1

s = unicode(s) expects ascii encoding by default. You need to supply it an encoding your input is in, e.g. s = unicode(s, 'utf-8').

Answer 2

try unicode(s, encoding) where encoding is whatever your terminal is in.

Answer 3

Looking at the error messages that you are seeing, it seems to me that your terminal encoding is probably set to KOI8-R, in which case you don't need to perform any decoding on the input data. If this is the case then all you need is:

>>> s = raw_input("Enter a string you want to translit: ")
>>> print ''.join([chr(ord(c) & 0x7F) for c in s])
kOD oBMENA iNFORMACIEJ, 8 BIT

You can double check this by s.decode('koi8-r') which should succeed and return the equivalent unicode string.