Question

I’m testing in Python if certain string contains something as follows

if substr in str:
  do_something()

The problem is when substr contains letter with diacritics and other non usual characters.
How would you recommend to do tests with such letters?

thank you

Answer 1

I do not know of any problems specific to diacritics in Python. The following works for me:

 u"ł" in u"źdźbło"
 >>> True

Edit:

u"ł" in u"źdźblo"
>>> False 

The matching is exact. If diacritics-insensitive matching is what you want, specify this in your question and see Fredrik’s answer.

Edit2: Yes, for string literals containing non-ascii chars you need to specify the encoding in the source file. Something like this should work:

# coding: utf-8