The first translation of Awasu 3.1 has been baking for a while, and is now ready to step out. Cláudio Mantovani Vieira was kind enough to do the translation, and it looks great There's just something about seeing Awasu running in a different language that is way cool; you shoulda seen the Arabic one, that was seriously freaky

If you'd like to translate Awasu into your favorite language, drop us a line, and if you happen to speak German or Russian, since we have translations for Awasu 3.0, the job's already half-done!

An Awasu user recently asked for some help in getting their Python code to work with Awasu, and while the problem turned out to be related to text encoding (which is not, strictly speaking, anything to do with Awasu), since this is such a common issue, I thought I'd write up some notes on how all it works.

The canonical introductory article on the subject is, of course, Joel Spolsky's The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)", but these notes will be a more practical guide, along the lines of "How do I get my code to *?@#'ing work?!?!"^[1]Now, there's a meme for you .

• Part 1: Of character sets, encodings, and other wondrous things
• Part 2: Calling the Awasu API using Python 2
• Part 3: Calling the Awasu API using Python 3
• Part 4: This is all too complicated, just tell me what to do!

Note that while this tutorial has separate sections on Python 2 and Python 3, even if you're only using one version of Python, you should read both sections if you want to really understand how things work.

This stuff is tricky to get your head around at first, but once you figure it out, it's actually not too bad. The problem is that even when you've got your code right, you start receiving content from elsewhere that is wrong, which breaks your code, so you change it to handle that content, but then your code breaks when you receive content from somewhere else that is doing things correctly^[2]Or also doing things incorrectly, but in a different way , and you get stuck in a cycle where your code never works properly Hopefully, these notes will help you know when your code is right, and you can stick to your guns and start yelling at the other guy to fix their code...

References[+]

References

↑1	Now, there's a meme for you
↑2	Or also doing things incorrectly, but in a different way