Question

I wrote a function in Python which is used to tell me whether the two words are similar or not.

Now I want to pass Japanese text in my same function. It is giving error “not a ascii character.” I tried using utf-8 encoding, but then it giving the same error

Non-ASCII character '\xe3' in file

Is there any way to do that? I cant generate the msg file for that since the 2 keyword will be not be constant.

Here goes the code

def filterKeyword(keyword, adText, filterType):
if (filterType == 'contains'):
    try :
        adtext = str.lower(adText)
        keyword = str.lower(keyword)
        if (adtext.find(keyword)!=-1):
            return '0'
    except:
        return '1'
if (filterType == 'exact'):
    var = cmp(str.lower(adText), str.lower(keyword))
    if(var == 0 ):
        return '0'

return '1'

I have used the following:

filterKeyword(unicode('ポケモン').encode("utf-8"), unicode('黄色のポケモン').encode("utf-8"), 'contains')

filterKeyword('ポケモン'.encode("utf-8"), '黄色のポケモン'.encode("utf-8"), 'contains')

Both of them are giving the error.

Answer 1

This worked for me:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

def filterKeyword(keyword, adText, filterType):
    # same as yours

filterKeyword(u'ポケモン', u'黄色のポケモン', 'contains')