  UNICODE SUPPORT
  ===============

Starting with release 2.4, IMDbPY internally manages (almost) every string
using unicode, with UTF-8 encoding.
Since release 3.0, every string containing some sort of information is
guarantee to be unicode (notable exceptions are dictionary keywords and
movieID/personID, where they are stored as strings).

The good: we can correctly manage "foreign" names, titles and other
          information.
          Previously every string was stored in bytecode, losing information
          about the original charset.
          Without knowing the charset, how can you know that the bytecode
          string 'Lina Wertm\xfcller' is west-European iso-8859-1 (and so
          it's "Lina Wertmüller" - if you're reading this file as UTF-8)
          and not Cyrillic KOI-8-R (resulting in "Lina WertmЭller")?
          Using unicode, you can store every human language, and show/print
          every char correctly, provided that your local charset (and font)
          is right.

The bad:  in primis, performances will suffer: IMDbPY does _a lot_ (and
          with _a lot_ I mean _A BLOODY DAMN LOT_) of string operations
          (moving, copying, splitting, searching, slicing, ...) and moving
          to unicode the slow down will be measurable (and probably
          noticeable).
          Moreover, every IMDbPY-base program will need to be modified,
          because utf-8 chars must be encoded-back to your local charset
          before they can be printed on screen or on files.

The ugly: converting to unicode a program so huge, born without unicode
          support from start, is prone to errors, bugs, spontaneous
          combustion and eternal damnation!
          You can't mix bytecode strings (with unknown charset) and unicode
          with impunity: an exception will be raised because python
          doesn't know the encoding of the bytecode string, that must be
          explicitly specified.


  INPUT
  =====

Searching for a movie title or a person name, you (or another program)
should pass a unicode string. Since input and output are always
encoded (using some scheme for representing characters using bytes),
you'll typically need to decode the input into a Python unicode
string.

The Python builtin function 'unicode' takes an encoded string and the
name of the charset it's encoded in and returns a Python unicode
string.

E.g., you're writing on a terminal with iso-8859-1 charset (aka latin-1):
 >>> from imdb import IMDb
 >>> ia = IMDb()
 >>>
 >>> lat1_str = 'Lina Wertm�ler' # written on a latin-1 terminal
 >>> unicode_str = unicode(lat1_str, 'iso-8859-1')
 >>>
 >>> results = ia.search_person(unicode_str)

If you pass a non-Unicode string to search_person(), search_movie() or
search_episode() functions, IMDbPY attempts to guess the encoding,
using the sys.stdin.encoding or the value returned from the
sys.getdefaultencoding function.  Trust me: you want to provide a
Unicode string...

Maybe in a future release the IMDb() function can take a "defaultInputEncoding"
argument or something.


  OUTPUT
  ======

You've searched for a person or a movie, you've retrieved the information you
wanted.  Cool.  Now you're about to print these information to the screen,
or send it to a file or over a network socket.  Ok, wait a minute.

Before you proceed, you need to encode the unicode chars to strings
in the charset you will use to display/save/send it:
 >>> from imdb import IMDb
 >>> ia = IMDb()
 >>>
 >>> gmv_str = unicode('gian maria volonte', 'ascii') # optional, IT'S ascii...
 >>> gmv = ia.search_person(gmv_str)[0]
 >>> ia.update(gmv) # fetch the default set of information.
 >>>
 >>> gmv['name']
 u'Gian Maria Volont\xe9'
 >>>
 >>> type(gmv['name'])
 >>> <type 'unicode'>
 >>>
 >>> print gmv['name'] # WRONG: because if you are on an ASCII only terminal...
 Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
 UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 17: ordinal not in range(128)
 >>>
 >>> print gmv['name'].encode(yourLocalEncoding, 'replace') # CORRECT.
 Gian Maria Volonté


You have to use the encode() method of unicode strings to obtain a string
suited for your local configuration.
The encoding depends on your system and on what you've to do with these
strings.
The second (optional) argument of the encode() method specifies what
to do with the unicode chars that cannot be represented in the encoding
of your choice.  If not specified, a UnicodeEncodeError exception is
raised, so be prepared.
Other values are 'ignore' to skip these chars, 'replace' to substitute
these chars with question marks ('?'), 'xmlcharrefreplace' to replace
the chars with XML references (e.g.: "&#233;" for "é").

If at all possible, you're much better off using an encoding like 'utf-8',
that can handle any unicode char, than older encodings like ASCII
and Latin-1.


  WRITING IMDbPY-based PROGRAMS
  =============================

In the imdb.helpers module you can find some functions useful to
manage/translate unicode strings in some common situations.


  RULE OF THUMB
  =============

Always convert to/from unicode at the I/O level: at the first moment
you've got some strings from the user (terminal) or the net (sockets,
web forms, whatever).  You need to know the encoding of the input,
checking sys.stding.encoding, the LANG/LC_* environment variables,
the headers of the http request and so on.
Whenever you're outputting information about movies or persons,
convert these unicode string to bytecode strings using the encoding
of your output channel (terminal, net, web pages, ...)

Remember: "u = unicode(string, inputEncoding)" convert your encoded input
          string to unicode,

          "s = u.encode(outputEncoding, manageErrors)" convert unicode
          strings to strings encoded for your local environment.


  LINKS
  =====

* The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must
  Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!):
  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

* Python Unicode HOWTO:
  http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/unicode

* Dive Into Python, unicode page:
  http://diveintopython.org/xml_processing/unicode.html

* How to Use UTF-8 with Python:
  http://evanjones.ca/python-utf8.html

* End to End Unicode Web Applications in Python:
  http://dalchemy.com/opensource/unicodedoc/

