how does python2.7 deal with unicode? I am more and more confused

Question

in linux, I opened terminal and input python2.7 and then input the codes as follows:

>>> s = u'\u0561'
>>> print s
ա
>>> len(s)
1

the length of u'\u0561' is only 1? Why?I learned that every non-alphabet character's length is 2~4 byte in unicode, why does it use only 1 byte? and i test other unicode characters, i found that almost all the unicode character's length is 1, why?

• Eryk Sun: Just to confuse you, try this on a narrow build (i.e. sys.maxuincode == 0xffff): len(u'\U00010000').

Answer 1

The len function doesn't count the number of bytes - it count the number of items in any sequence (in this case, the number of characters in the string).

Answer 2

the length of u'\u0561' is only 1? Why?

Because ա is one character.

In other words, for the same reason that the len() of ['hi mom this is an incredibly long string'] is 1: because 'hi mom this is an incredibly long string' is one list item.

Answer 3

It's giving you the length in characters, not bytes.

\u0561

This is one character, so the length is one.