Unicode and passing strings — Anaconda Enterprise 4.4 documentation

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# Unicode and passing strings

Similar to the string semantics in Python 3, Cython strictly separates byte strings and unicode strings. Above all, this means that by default there is no automatic conversion between byte strings and unicode strings (except for what Python 2 does in string operations). All encoding and decoding must pass through an explicit encoding/decoding step. To ease conversion between Python and C strings in simple cases, the module-level `c_string_type` and `c_string_encoding` directives can be used to implicitly insert these encoding/decoding steps.

## Python string types in Cython code

Cython supports four Python string types: `bytes`, `str`, `unicode` and `basestring`. The `bytes` and `unicode` types are the specific types known from normal Python 2.x (named `bytes` and `str` in Python 3). Additionally, Cython also supports the `bytearray` type which behaves like the `bytes` type, except that it is mutable.

The `str` type is special in that it is the byte string in Python 2 and the Unicode string in Python 3 (for Cython code compiled with language level 2, i.e. the default). Meaning, it always corresponds exactly with the type that the Python runtime itself calls `str`. Thus, in Python 2, both `bytes` and `str` represent the byte string type, whereas in Python 3, both `str` and `unicode` represent the Python Unicode string type. The switch is made at C compile time, the Python version that is used to run Cython is not relevant.

When compiling Cython code with language level 3, the `str` type is identified with exactly the Unicode string type at Cython compile time, i.e. it does not identify with `bytes` when running in Python 2.

Note that the `str` type is not compatible with the `unicode` type in Python 2, i.e. you cannot assign a Unicode string to a variable or argument that is typed `str`. The attempt will result in either a compile time error (if detectable) or a `TypeError` exception at runtime. You should therefore be careful when you statically type a string variable in code that must be compatible with Python 2, as this Python version allows a mix of byte strings and unicode strings for data and users normally expect code to be able to work with both. Code that only targets Python 3 can safely type variables and arguments as either `bytes` or `unicode`.

The `basestring` type represents both the types `str` and `unicode`, i.e. all Python text string types in Python 2 and Python 3. This can be used for typing text variables that normally contain Unicode text (at least in Python 3) but must additionally accept the `str` type in Python 2 for backwards compatibility reasons. It is not compatible with the `bytes` type. Its usage should be rare in normal Cython code as the generic `object` type (i.e. untyped code) will normally be good enough and has the additional advantage of supporting the assignment of string subtypes. Support for the `basestring` type was added in Cython 0.20.

## String literals

Cython understands all Python string type prefixes:

- `b'bytes'` for byte strings
- `u'text'` for Unicode strings
- `f'formatted {value}'` for formatted Unicode string literals as defined by PEP 498 (added in Cython 0.24)

Unprefixed string literals become `str` objects when compiling with language level 2 and `unicode` objects (i.e. Python 3 `str`) with language level 3.

## General notes about C strings

In many use cases, C strings (a.k.a. character pointers) are slow and cumbersome. For one, they usually require manual memory management in one way or another, which makes it more likely to introduce bugs into your code.

Then, Python string objects cache their length, so requesting it (e.g. to validate the bounds of index access or when concatenating two strings into one) is an efficient constant time operation. In contrast, calling `strlen()` to get this information from a C string takes linear time, which makes many operations on C strings rather costly.

Regarding text processing, Python has built-in support for Unicode, which C lacks completely. If you are dealing with Unicode text, you are usually better off using Python Unicode string objects than trying to work with encoded data in C strings. Cython makes this quite easy and efficient.

Generally speaking: unless you know what you are doing, avoid using C strings where possible and use Python string objects instead. The obvious exception to this is when passing them back and forth from and to external C code. Also, C++ strings remember their length as well, so they can provide a suitable alternative to Python bytes objects in some cases, e.g. when reference counting is not needed within a well defined context.

## Passing byte strings

It is very easy to pass byte strings between C code and Python. When receiving a byte string from a C library, you can let Cython convert it into a Python byte string by simply assigning it to a Python variable:

    cdef char* c_string = c_call_returning_a_c_string()
    cdef bytes py_string = c_string

A type cast to `object` or `bytes` will do the same thing:

    py_string = <bytes> c_string

This creates a Python byte string object that holds a copy of the original C string. It can be safely passed around in Python code, and will be garbage collected when the last reference to it goes out of scope. It is important to remember that null bytes in the string act as terminator character, as generally known from C. The above will therefore only work correctly for C strings that do not contain null bytes.

Besides not working for null bytes, the above is also very inefficient for long strings, since Cython has to call `strlen()` on the C string first to find out the length by counting the bytes up to the terminating null byte. In many cases, the user code will know the length already, e.g. because a C function returned it. In this case, it is much more efficient to tell Cython the exact number of bytes by slicing the C string:

    cdef char* c_string = NULL
    cdef Py_ssize_t length = 0

    # get pointer and length from a C function
    get_a_c_string(&c_string, &length)

    py_bytes_string = c_string[:length]

Here, no additional byte counting is required and `length` bytes from the `c_string` will be copied into the Python bytes object, including any null bytes. Keep in mind that the slice indices are assumed to be accurate in this case and no bounds checking is done, so incorrect slice indices will lead to data corruption and crashes.

Note that the creation of the Python bytes string can fail with an exception, e.g. due to insufficient memory. If you need to `free()` the string after the conversion, you should wrap the assignment in a try-finally construct:

    from libc.stdlib cimport free
    cdef bytes py_string
    cdef char* c_string = c_call_creating_a_new_c_string()
    try:
        py_string = c_string
    finally:
        free(c_string)

To convert the byte string back into a C `char*`, use the opposite assignment:

    cdef char* other_c_string = py_string

This is a very fast operation after which `other_c_string` points to the byte string buffer of the Python string itself. It is tied to the life time of the Python string. When the Python string is garbage collected, the pointer becomes invalid. It is therefore important to keep a reference to the Python string as long as the `char*` is in use. Often enough, this only spans the call to a C function that receives the pointer as parameter. Special care must be taken, however, when the C function stores the pointer for later use. Apart from keeping a Python reference to the string object, no manual memory management is required.

Starting with Cython 0.20, the `bytearray` type is supported and coerces in the same way as the `bytes` type. However, when using it in a C context, special care must be taken not to grow or shrink the object buffer after converting it to a C string pointer. These modifications can change the internal buffer address, which will make the pointer invalid.

## Accepting strings from Python code

The other side, receiving input from Python code, may appear simple at first sight, as it only deals with objects. However, getting this right without making the API too narrow or too unsafe may not be entirely obvious.

In the case that the API only deals with byte strings, i.e. binary data or encoded text, it is best not to type the input argument as something like `bytes`, because that would restrict the allowed input to exactly that type and exclude both subtypes and other kinds of byte containers, e.g. `bytearray` objects or memory views.

Depending on how (and where) the data is being processed, it may be a good idea to instead receive a 1-dimensional memory view, e.g.

    def process_byte_data(unsigned char[:] data):
        length = data.shape[0]
        first_byte = data[0]
        slice_view = data[1:-1]
        ...

Cython’s memory views are described in more detail in Typed Memoryviews, but the above example already shows most of the relevant functionality for 1-dimensional byte views. They allow for efficient processing of arrays and accept anything that can unpack itself into a byte buffer, without intermediate copying. The processed content can finally be returned in the memory view itself (or a slice of it), but it is often better to copy the data back into a flat and simple `bytes` or `bytearray` object, especially when only a small slice is returned. Since memoryviews do not copy the data, they would otherwise keep the entire original buffer alive. The general idea here is to be liberal with input by accepting any kind of byte buffer, but strict with output by returning a simple, well adapted object. This can simply be done as follows:

    def process_byte_data(unsigned char[:] data):
        # ... process the data
        if return_all:
            return bytes(data)
        else:
            # example for returning a slice
            return bytes(data[5:35])

If the byte input is actually encoded text, and the further processing should happen at the Unicode level, then the right thing to do is to decode the input straight away. This is almost only a problem in Python 2.x, where Python code expects that it can pass a byte string (`str`) with encoded text into a text API. Since this usually happens in more than one place in the module’s API, a helper function is almost always the way to go, since it allows for easy adaptation of the input normalisation process later.

This kind of input normalisation function will commonly look similar to the following:

    from cpython.version cimport PY_MAJOR_VERSION

    cdef unicode _ustring(s):
        if type(s) is unicode:
            # fast path for most common case(s)
            return <unicode>s
        elif PY_MAJOR_VERSION < 3 and isinstance(s, bytes):
            # only accept byte strings in Python 2.x, not in Py3
            return (<bytes>s).decode('ascii')
        elif isinstance(s, unicode):
            # an evil cast to <unicode> might work here in some(!) cases,
            # depending on what the further processing does.  to be safe,
            # we can always create a copy instead
            return unicode(s)
        else:
            raise TypeError(...)

And should then be used like this:

    def api_func(s):
        text = _ustring(s)
        ...

Similarly, if the further processing happens at the byte level, but Unicode string input should be accepted, then the following might work, if you are using memory views:

    # define a global name for whatever char type is used in the module
    ctypedef unsigned char char_type

    cdef char_type[:] _chars(s):
        if isinstance(s, unicode):
            # encode to the specific encoding used inside of the module
            s = (<unicode>s).encode('utf8')
        return s

In this case, you might want to additionally ensure that byte string input really uses the correct encoding, e.g. if you require pure ASCII input data, you can run over the buffer in a loop and check the highest bit of each byte. This should then also be done in the input normalisation function.

## Dealing with “const”

Many C libraries use the `const` modifier in their API to declare that they will not modify a string, or to require that users must not modify a string they return, for example:

    typedef const char specialChar;
    int process_string(const char* s);
    const unsigned char* look_up_cached_string(const unsigned char* key);

Since version 0.18, Cython has support for the `const` modifier in the language, so you can declare the above functions straight away as follows:

    cdef extern from "someheader.h":
        ctypedef const char specialChar
        int process_string(const char* s)
        const unsigned char* look_up_cached_string(const unsigned char* key)

Previous versions required users to make the necessary declarations at a textual level. If you need to support older Cython versions, you can use the following approach.

In general, for arguments of external C functions, the `const` modifier does not matter and can be left out in the Cython declaration (e.g. in a .pxd file). The C compiler will still do the right thing, even if you declare this to Cython:

    cdef extern from "someheader.h":
        int process_string(char* s)   # note: looses API information!

However, in most other situations, such as for return values and variables that use specifically typedef-ed API types, it does matter and the C compiler will emit at least a warning if used incorrectly. To help with this, you can use the type definitions in the `libc.string` module, e.g.:

    from libc.string cimport const_char, const_uchar

    cdef extern from "someheader.h":
        ctypedef const_char specialChar
        int process_string(const_char* s)
        const_uchar* look_up_cached_string(const_uchar* key)

Note: even if the API only uses `const` for function arguments, it is still preferable to properly declare them using these provided `const_char` types in order to simplify adaptations. In Cython 0.18, these standard declarations have been changed to use the correct `const` modifier, so your code will automatically benefit from the new `const` support if it uses them.

## Decoding bytes to text

The initially presented way of passing and receiving C strings is sufficient if your code only deals with binary data in the strings. When we deal with encoded text, however, it is best practice to decode the C byte strings to Python Unicode strings on reception, and to encode Python Unicode strings to C byte strings on the way out.

With a Python byte string object, you would normally just call the `bytes.decode()` method to decode it into a Unicode string:

    ustring = byte_string.decode('UTF-8')

Cython allows you to do the same for a C string, as long as it contains no null bytes:

    cdef char* some_c_string = c_call_returning_a_c_string()
    ustring = some_c_string.decode('UTF-8')

And, more efficiently, for strings where the length is known:

    cdef char* c_string = NULL
    cdef Py_ssize_t length = 0

    # get pointer and length from a C function
    get_a_c_string(&c_string, &length)

    ustring = c_string[:length].decode('UTF-8')

The same should be used when the string contains null bytes, e.g. when it uses an encoding like UCS-4, where each character is encoded in four bytes most of which tend to be 0.

Again, no bounds checking is done if slice indices are provided, so incorrect indices lead to data corruption and crashes. However, using negative indices is possible since Cython 0.17 and will inject a call to `strlen()` in order to determine the string length. Obviously, this only works for 0-terminated strings without internal null bytes. Text encoded in UTF-8 or one of the ISO-8859 encodings is usually a good candidate. If in doubt, it’s better to pass indices that are ‘obviously’ correct than to rely on the data to be as expected.

It is common practice to wrap string conversions (and non-trivial type conversions in general) in dedicated functions, as this needs to be done in exactly the same way whenever receiving text from C. This could look as follows:

    from libc.stdlib cimport free

    cdef unicode tounicode(char* s):
        return s.decode('UTF-8', 'strict')

    cdef unicode tounicode_with_length(
            char* s, size_t length):
        return s[:length].decode('UTF-8', 'strict')

    cdef unicode tounicode_with_length_and_free(
            char* s, size_t length):
        try:
            return s[:length].decode('UTF-8', 'strict')
        finally:
            free(s)

Most likely, you will prefer shorter function names in your code based on the kind of string being handled. Different types of content often imply different ways of handling them on reception. To make the code more readable and to anticipate future changes, it is good practice to use separate conversion functions for different types of strings.

## Encoding text to bytes

The reverse way, converting a Python unicode string to a C `char*`, is pretty efficient by itself, assuming that what you actually want is a memory managed byte string:

    py_byte_string = py_unicode_string.encode('UTF-8')
    cdef char* c_string = py_byte_string

As noted before, this takes the pointer to the byte buffer of the Python byte string. Trying to do the same without keeping a reference to the Python byte string will fail with a compile error:

    # this will not compile !
    cdef char* c_string = py_unicode_string.encode('UTF-8')

Here, the Cython compiler notices that the code takes a pointer to a temporary string result that will be garbage collected after the assignment. Later access to the invalidated pointer will read invalid memory and likely result in a segfault. Cython will therefore refuse to compile this code.

## C++ strings

When wrapping a C++ library, strings will usually come in the form of the `std::string` class. As with C strings, Python byte strings automatically coerce from and to C++ strings:

    # distutils: language = c++

    from libcpp.string cimport string

    cdef string s = py_bytes_object
    try:
        s.append('abc')
        py_bytes_object = s
    finally:
        del s

The memory management situation is different than in C because the creation of a C++ string makes an independent copy of the string buffer which the string object then owns. It is therefore possible to convert temporarily created Python objects directly into C++ strings. A common way to make use of this is when encoding a Python unicode string into a C++ string:

    cdef string cpp_string = py_unicode_string.encode('UTF-8')

Note that this involves a bit of overhead because it first encodes the Unicode string into a temporarily created Python bytes object and then copies its buffer into a new C++ string.

For the other direction, efficient decoding support is available in Cython 0.17 and later:

    cdef string s = string(b'abcdefg')

    ustring1 = s.decode('UTF-8')
    ustring2 = s[2:-2].decode('UTF-8')

For C++ strings, decoding slices will always take the proper length of the string into account and apply Python slicing semantics (e.g. return empty strings for out-of-bounds indices).

## Auto encoding and decoding

Cython 0.19 comes with two new directives: `c_string_type` and `c_string_encoding`. They can be used to change the Python string types that C/C++ strings coerce from and to. By default, they only coerce from and to the bytes type, and encoding or decoding must be done explicitly, as described above.

There are two use cases where this is inconvenient. First, if all C strings that are being processed (or the large majority) contain text, automatic encoding and decoding from and to Python unicode objects can reduce the code overhead a little. In this case, you can set the `c_string_type` directive in your module to `unicode` and the `c_string_encoding` to the encoding that your C code uses, for example:

    # cython: c_string_type=unicode, c_string_encoding=utf8

    cdef char* c_string = 'abcdefg'

    # implicit decoding:
    cdef object py_unicode_object = c_string

    # explicit conversion to Python bytes:
    py_bytes_object = <bytes>c_string

The second use case is when all C strings that are being processed only contain ASCII encodable characters (e.g. numbers) and you want your code to use the native legacy string type in Python 2 for them, instead of always using Unicode. In this case, you can set the string type to `str`:

    # cython: c_string_type=str, c_string_encoding=ascii

    cdef char* c_string = 'abcdefg'

    # implicit decoding in Py3, bytes conversion in Py2:
    cdef object py_str_object = c_string

    # explicit conversion to Python bytes:
    py_bytes_object = <bytes>c_string

    # explicit conversion to Python unicode:
    py_bytes_object = <unicode>c_string

The other direction, i.e. automatic encoding to C strings, is only supported for the ASCII codec (and the “default encoding”, which is runtime specific and may or may not be ASCII). This is because CPython handles the memory management in this case by keeping an encoded copy of the string alive together with the original unicode string. Otherwise, there would be no way to limit the lifetime of the encoded string in any sensible way, thus rendering any attempt to extract a C string pointer from it a dangerous endeavour. As long as you stick to the ASCII encoding for the `c_string_encoding` directive, though, the following will work:

    # cython: c_string_type=unicode, c_string_encoding=ascii

    def func():
        ustring = u'abc'
        cdef char* s = ustring
        return s[0]    # returns u'a'

(This example uses a function context in order to safely control the lifetime of the Unicode string. Global Python variables can be modified from the outside, which makes it dangerous to rely on the lifetime of their values.)

## Source code encoding

When string literals appear in the code, the source code encoding is important. It determines the byte sequence that Cython will store in the C code for bytes literals, and the Unicode code points that Cython builds for unicode literals when parsing the byte encoded source file. Following PEP 263, Cython supports the explicit declaration of source file encodings. For example, putting the following comment at the top of an `ISO-8859-15` (Latin-9) encoded source file (into the first or second line) is required to enable `ISO-8859-15` decoding in the parser:

    # -*- coding: ISO-8859-15 -*-

When no explicit encoding declaration is provided, the source code is parsed as UTF-8 encoded text, as specified by PEP 3120. UTF-8 is a very common encoding that can represent the entire Unicode set of characters and is compatible with plain ASCII encoded text that it encodes efficiently. This makes it a very good choice for source code files which usually consist mostly of ASCII characters.

As an example, putting the following line into a UTF-8 encoded source file will print `5`, as UTF-8 encodes the letter `'ö'` in the two byte sequence `'\xc3\xb6'`:

    print( len(b'abcö') )

whereas the following `ISO-8859-15` encoded source file will print `4`, as the encoding uses only 1 byte for this letter:

    # -*- coding: ISO-8859-15 -*-
    print( len(b'abcö') )

Note that the unicode literal `u'abcö'` is a correctly decoded four character Unicode string in both cases, whereas the unprefixed Python `str` literal `'abcö'` will become a byte string in Python 2 (thus having length 4 or 5 in the examples above), and a 4 character Unicode string in Python 3. If you are not familiar with encodings, this may not appear obvious at first read. See CEP 108 for details.

As a rule of thumb, it is best to avoid unprefixed non-ASCII `str` literals and to use unicode string literals for all text. Cython also supports the `__future__` import `unicode_literals` that instructs the parser to read all unprefixed `str` literals in a source file as unicode string literals, just like Python 3.

## Single bytes and characters

The Python C-API uses the normal C `char` type to represent a byte value, but it has two special integer types for a Unicode code point value, i.e. a single Unicode character: `Py_UNICODE` and `Py_UCS4`. Since version 0.13, Cython supports the first natively, support for `Py_UCS4` is new in Cython 0.15. `Py_UNICODE` is either defined as an unsigned 2-byte or 4-byte integer, or as `wchar_t`, depending on the platform. The exact type is a compile time option in the build of the CPython interpreter and extension modules inherit this definition at C compile time. The advantage of `Py_UCS4` is that it is guaranteed to be large enough for any Unicode code point value, regardless of the platform. It is defined as a 32bit unsigned int or long.

In Cython, the `char` type behaves differently from the `Py_UNICODE` and `Py_UCS4` types when coercing to Python objects. Similar to the behaviour of the bytes type in Python 3, the `char` type coerces to a Python integer value by default, so that the following prints 65 and not `A`:

    # -*- coding: ASCII -*-

    cdef char char_val = 'A'
    assert char_val == 65   # ASCII encoded byte value of 'A'
    print( char_val )

If you want a Python bytes string instead, you have to request it explicitly, and the following will print `A` (or `b'A'` in Python 3):

    print( <bytes>char_val )

The explicit coercion works for any C integer type. Values outside of the range of a `char` or `unsigned char` will raise an `OverflowError` at runtime. Coercion will also happen automatically when assigning to a typed variable, e.g.:

    cdef bytes py_byte_string
    py_byte_string = char_val

On the other hand, the `Py_UNICODE` and `Py_UCS4` types are rarely used outside of the context of a Python unicode string, so their default behaviour is to coerce to a Python unicode object. The following will therefore print the character `A`, as would the same code with the `Py_UNICODE` type:

    cdef Py_UCS4 uchar_val = u'A'
    assert uchar_val == 65 # character point value of u'A'
    print( uchar_val )

Again, explicit casting will allow users to override this behaviour. The following will print 65:

    cdef Py_UCS4 uchar_val = u'A'
    print( <long>uchar_val )

Note that casting to a C `long` (or `unsigned long`) will work just fine, as the maximum code point value that a Unicode character can have is 1114111 (`0x10FFFF`). On platforms with 32bit or more, `int` is just as good.

## Narrow Unicode builds

In narrow Unicode builds of CPython before version 3.3, i.e. builds where `sys.maxunicode` is 65535 (such as all Windows builds, as opposed to 1114111 in wide builds), it is still possible to use Unicode character code points that do not fit into the 16 bit wide `Py_UNICODE` type. For example, such a CPython build will accept the unicode literal `u'\U00012345'`. However, the underlying system level encoding leaks into Python space in this case, so that the length of this literal becomes 2 instead of 1. This also shows when iterating over it or when indexing into it. The visible substrings are `u'\uD808'` and `u'\uDF45'` in this example. They form a so-called surrogate pair that represents the above character.

For more information on this topic, it is worth reading the Wikipedia article about the UTF-16 encoding.

The same properties apply to Cython code that gets compiled for a narrow CPython runtime environment. In most cases, e.g. when searching for a substring, this difference can be ignored as both the text and the substring will contain the surrogates. So most Unicode processing code will work correctly also on narrow builds. Encoding, decoding and printing will work as expected, so that the above literal turns into exactly the same byte sequence on both narrow and wide Unicode platforms.

However, programmers should be aware that a single `Py_UNICODE` value (or single ‘character’ unicode string in CPython) may not be enough to represent a complete Unicode character on narrow platforms. For example, if an independent search for `u'\uD808'` and `u'\uDF45'` in a unicode string succeeds, this does not necessarily mean that the character `u'\U00012345` is part of that string. It may well be that two different characters are in the string that just happen to share a code unit with the surrogate pair of the character in question. Looking for substrings works correctly because the two code units in the surrogate pair use distinct value ranges, so the pair is always identifiable in a sequence of code points.

As of version 0.15, Cython has extended support for surrogate pairs so that you can safely use an `in` test to search character values from the full `Py_UCS4` range even on narrow platforms:

    cdef Py_UCS4 uchar = 0x12345
    print( uchar in some_unicode_string )

Similarly, it can coerce a one character string with a high Unicode code point value to a Py_UCS4 value on both narrow and wide Unicode platforms:

    cdef Py_UCS4 uchar = u'\U00012345'
    assert uchar == 0x12345

In CPython 3.3 and later, the `Py_UNICODE` type is an alias for the system specific `wchar_t` type and is no longer tied to the internal representation of the Unicode string. Instead, any Unicode character can be represented on all platforms without resorting to surrogate pairs. This implies that narrow builds no longer exist from that version on, regardless of the size of `Py_UNICODE`. See PEP 393 for details.

Cython 0.16 and later handles this change internally and does the right thing also for single character values as long as either type inference is applied to untyped variables or the portable `Py_UCS4` type is explicitly used in the source code instead of the platform specific `Py_UNICODE` type. Optimisations that Cython applies to the Python unicode type will automatically adapt to PEP 393 at C compile time, as usual.

## Iteration

Cython 0.13 supports efficient iteration over `char*`, bytes and unicode strings, as long as the loop variable is appropriately typed. So the following will generate the expected C code:

    cdef char* c_string = ...

    cdef char c
    for c in c_string[:100]:
        if c == 'A': ...

The same applies to bytes objects:

    cdef bytes bytes_string = ...

    cdef char c
    for c in bytes_string:
        if c == 'A': ...

For unicode objects, Cython will automatically infer the type of the loop variable as `Py_UCS4`:

    cdef unicode ustring = ...

    # NOTE: no typing required for 'uchar' !
    for uchar in ustring:
        if uchar == u'A': ...

The automatic type inference usually leads to much more efficient code here. However, note that some unicode operations still require the value to be a Python object, so Cython may end up generating redundant conversion code for the loop variable value inside of the loop. If this leads to a performance degradation for a specific piece of code, you can either type the loop variable as a Python object explicitly, or assign its value to a Python typed variable somewhere inside of the loop to enforce one-time coercion before running Python operations on it.

There are also optimisations for `in` tests, so that the following code will run in plain C code, (actually using a switch statement):

    cdef Py_UCS4 uchar_val = get_a_unicode_character()
    if uchar_val in u'abcABCxY':
        ...

Combined with the looping optimisation above, this can result in very efficient character switching code, e.g. in unicode parsers.

## Windows and wide character APIs

Windows system APIs natively support Unicode in the form of zero-terminated UTF-16 encoded `wchar_t*` strings, so called “wide strings”.

By default, Windows builds of CPython define `Py_UNICODE` as a synonym for `wchar_t`. This makes internal `unicode` representation compatible with UTF-16 and allows for efficient zero-copy conversions. This also means that Windows builds are always Narrow Unicode builds with all the caveats.

To aid interoperation with Windows APIs, Cython 0.19 supports wide strings (in the form of `Py_UNICODE*`) and implicitly converts them to and from `unicode` string objects. These conversions behave the same way as they do for `char*` and `bytes` as described in Passing byte strings.

In addition to automatic conversion, unicode literals that appear in C context become C-level wide string literals and `len()` built-in function is specialized to compute the length of zero-terminated `Py_UNICODE*` string or array.

Here is an example of how one would call a Unicode API on Windows:

    cdef extern from "Windows.h":

        ctypedef Py_UNICODE WCHAR
        ctypedef const WCHAR* LPCWSTR
        ctypedef void* HWND

        int MessageBoxW(HWND hWnd, LPCWSTR lpText, LPCWSTR lpCaption, int uType)

    title = u"Windows Interop Demo - Python %d.%d.%d" % sys.version_info[:3]
    MessageBoxW(NULL, u"Hello Cython \u263a", title, 0)

Warning

The use of `Py_UNICODE*` strings outside of Windows is strongly discouraged. `Py_UNICODE` is inherently not portable between different platforms and Python versions.

CPython 3.3 has moved to a flexible internal representation of unicode strings (PEP 393), making all `Py_UNICODE` related APIs deprecated and inefficient.

One consequence of CPython 3.3 changes is that `len()` of `unicode` strings is always measured in code points (“characters”), while Windows API expect the number of UTF-16 code units (where each surrogate is counted individually). To always get the number of code units, call `PyUnicode_GetSize()` directly.