Question

I’ve downloaded the double metaphone function: https://github.com/dracos/double-metaphone

It’ supposed to work like this:

>>> dm(u'aubrey')
('APR', '')
>>> dm(u'richard')
('RXRT', 'RKRT')
>>> dm(u'katherine') == dm(u'catherine')
True

How do I pass a variable to this function? The u is always in the way. I need to be able to do

dm(x)==dm(y)

right now this is what happens:

>>> x='wal mart'
>>> y='wall mart'
>>> dm(x)==dm(y)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<pyshell#35>", line 1, in <module>
dm(x)==dm(y)
File "<pyshell#18>", line 6, in dm
st = ''.join((c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', st) if unicodedata.category(c) != 'Mn'))
TypeError: normalize() argument 2 must be unicode, not str

Answer 1

u'' is the syntax for a literal unicode string object, comparable to a regular str object except that it can handle Unicode characters.

>>> type('foobar')
<type 'str'>
>>> type(u'foobar')
<type 'unicode'>
>>> 'foobar' == u'foobar'
True

As long as your input is accepted by the function you’re calling, you don’t need the u. For example:

x = u'richard'
dm(x)

---

You receive TypeError because the function expects unicode objects and you are passing it str objects. Change these lines:

x='wal mart'
y='wall mart'

To:

x=u'wal mart'
y=u'wall mart'

If you will be working with str objects, then you can convert them to unicode objects using the unicode() constructor:

x='wal mart'
y='wall mart'

dm(unicode(x)) == dm(unicode(y))