Python Programming On Win32

A Japanese Python?

Andy is currently working for a global investment company that is internationalizing its core applications to work with Far Eastern markets. The company’s client platform is Windows, and core data is stored on Sybase servers and AS400 minicomputers; data flows back and forth among all three platforms continually. All these systems represent Japanese characters in totally different ways and work with different character sets. It was necessary not only to develop a library to convert between these encodings, but also to prove that it worked with 100% effectiveness for all the data that might be encountered in future years. This was not an easy task, as the size of the character set varied from one platform to another.

The first stage was to code the conversions in Python, based on published algorithms and lookup tables. The interactive prompt lets you look at the input and output strings early on and get all the details right working with single, short strings. I then developed classes to represent character sets and character maps and fed in the published government character sets—easy to do with Python’s lists and dictionaries. I found subtle holes in published information and was able to correct for them. Having done this, I was able to prove that round-trip conversion was possible in many cases and to identify the characters that would not survive a round trip in others.

The company’s cross-platform C++ guru then wrote a DLL to carry out string translations ...