Object Storage Service:Handling Chinese characters and time (Python SDK V1)

Chinese characters

If your Python code contains Chinese characters, a runtime error may occur. To prevent this error, declare the character encoding at the beginning of your code. For example:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
            

• Data types

  Python 2 supports the following two data types:

  Data type	Description
  str	A string. This corresponds to the bytes type in Python 3.x.
  unicode	A unicode stream. Its length is the number of characters. For example, the length of u'éà' is 2.

  Python 3 supports the following two data types:

  Data type	Description
  str	A string. This corresponds to the unicode type in Python 2.x.
  bytes	A byte stream. The length is the number of bytes. For example, the length of b'Chinese' depends on the encoding. If the encoding is UTF-8, the length is 6.

• Input and output type conventions

  The input type conventions are as follows:

  Input	Type	Notes
  OSS file name	str	If the type is bytes, it must be UTF-8 encoded.
  Local file name	str, unicode	If the type is bytes, it must be UTF-8 encoded. For example, the yourLocalFile parameter in bucket.get_object_to_file.
  Input data stream	bytes	For example, the data parameter in bucket.put_object.

  The output type conventions are as follows:

  Output	Type	Notes
  Result of XML parsing	str	For example, the strings in the result of bucket.list_object.
  Downloaded content	bytes	The Python SDK uses UTF-8 encoding for the bytes type by default. Ensure that your Python source file is also UTF-8 encoded.

• Type conversion functions

  The Python SDK provides three functions for type conversion:

  Function	Description
  to_bytes	- In Python 2.x, converts unicode to str. For other types, the initial value is returned. - In Python 3.x, converts str to bytes. For other types, the initial value is returned.
  to_unicode	- In Python 2.x, converts str to unicode. For other types, the initial value is returned. - In Python 3.x, converts bytes to str. For other types, the initial value is returned.
  to_string	In Python 2.x, this function is equivalent to to_bytes. In Python 3.x, it is equivalent to to_unicode.

Time

The Python SDK converts time values of the datetime.datetime type that are returned from the server to UNIX timestamps. A UNIX timestamp is the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on January 1, 1970. For example, the last_modified value returned by the bucket.get_object method is an integer that represents a UNIX timestamp.

You can use the datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp() method to convert a UNIX timestamp to a datetime object.