First character of string in Python

Question

In Python I have got this string

string = "Ľubomír Mezovský"

I need to get only first character of it. But when I tried string[0] it returned . When I tried string[:2] it worked well. My question is why? I need to run this for several strings and when string does not start with diacritic character, it returns substring of two characters.

I am also using # encoding=utf8 and Python 2.7

Answer 1

You're dealing with byte-string (assuming you're using Python 2.x).

Convert the byte-string to unicode-string using str.decode , get the first character, then convert it back to binary string using str.encode (optional unless you should use byte-string)

>>> string = "Ľubomír Mezovský"
>>> print(string.decode('utf-8')[0].encode('utf-8'))
Ľ

Answer 2

Try converting the string to Unicode and the encode to "utf-8"

Ex:

string = u"Ľubomír Mezovský"
print string[0].encode('utf-8')

Output:

Ľ

Tested in python2.7