Question

I know that to check whether a string is printable, we can do something like:

def isprintable(s,codec='utf8'):
    try: 
        s.codec(codec)
    except UnicodeDecodeError: 
        return False
    else: 
        return True

But is there a way to do it with Unicode, not a string?
Btw, I’m working with tweets, and I convert the tweets to Unicode as follows

text=unicode(status.text)

Answer 1

You are looking for a test for a range of codepoints, so you need a regular expression:

import re
# match characters from ¿ to the end of the JSON-encodable range
exclude = re.compile(ur'[\u00bf-\uffff]')

def isprintable(s):
    return not bool(exclude.search(s))

This will return False for any unicode text that has codepoints past \u00BE (“¾”).

>>> isprintable(u'Hello World!')
True
>>> isprintable(u'Jeg \u00f8ve mit Norsk.')
False