Mapping Windows CP1252 Gremlins to Unicode

April 26, 2003 | Fredrik Lundh

Some applications add CP1252 (Windows, Western Europe) characters to documents marked up as ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) or other encodings. These characters are not valid ISO-8859-1 characters, and may cause all sorts of problems in processing and display applications.

The following code fragment shows how you can map CP1252-specific characters to their Unicode counterparts. To convert the resulting string to a suitable target encoding, see Python Unicode Objects.

Mapping Windows CP1252 Characters to Unicode

cp1252 = {
    # from http://www.microsoft.com/typography/unicode/1252.htm
    u"\x80": u"\u20AC", # EURO SIGN
    u"\x82": u"\u201A", # SINGLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
    u"\x83": u"\u0192", # LATIN SMALL LETTER F WITH HOOK
    u"\x84": u"\u201E", # DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
    u"\x85": u"\u2026", # HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS
    u"\x86": u"\u2020", # DAGGER
    u"\x87": u"\u2021", # DOUBLE DAGGER
    u"\x88": u"\u02C6", # MODIFIER LETTER CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT
    u"\x89": u"\u2030", # PER MILLE SIGN
    u"\x8A": u"\u0160", # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CARON
    u"\x8B": u"\u2039", # SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
    u"\x8C": u"\u0152", # LATIN CAPITAL LIGATURE OE
    u"\x8E": u"\u017D", # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH CARON
    u"\x91": u"\u2018", # LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    u"\x92": u"\u2019", # RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
    u"\x93": u"\u201C", # LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    u"\x94": u"\u201D", # RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
    u"\x95": u"\u2022", # BULLET
    u"\x96": u"\u2013", # EN DASH
    u"\x97": u"\u2014", # EM DASH
    u"\x98": u"\u02DC", # SMALL TILDE
    u"\x99": u"\u2122", # TRADE MARK SIGN
    u"\x9A": u"\u0161", # LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON
    u"\x9B": u"\u203A", # SINGLE RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
    u"\x9C": u"\u0153", # LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE
    u"\x9E": u"\u017E", # LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH CARON
    u"\x9F": u"\u0178", # LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y WITH DIAERESIS
}

import re

def kill_gremlins(text):
    # map cp1252 gremlins to real unicode characters
    if re.search(u"[\x80-\x9f]", text):
        def fixup(m):
            s = m.group(0)
            return cp1252.get(s, s)
        if isinstance(text, type("")):
            # make sure we have a unicode string
            text = unicode(text, "iso-8859-1")
        text = re.sub(u"[\x80-\x9f]", fixup, text)
    return text