Check that a string contains only ASCII characters?

Question

How do I check that a string only contains ASCII characters in Python? Something like Ruby\'s ascii_only?

I want to be able to tell whether string speci

Answer 1

A workaround to your problem would be to try and encode the string in a particular encoding.

For example:

'H€llø'.encode('utf-8')

This will throw the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "", line 1, in 
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

Now you can catch the "UnicodeDecodeError" to determine that the string did not contain just the ASCII characters.

try:
    'H€llø'.encode('utf-8')
except UnicodeDecodeError:
    print 'This string contains more than just the ASCII characters.'