1. About this book

The book is written in reStructuredText (reST) syntax and compiled by Sphinx.

I started to write in the 25th September 2010.

1.1. License

This book is distributed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

1.2. Thanks to

Reviewers: Alexander Belopolsky, Antoine Pitrou, Feth Arezki and Nelle Varoquaux, Natal Ngétal.

1.3. Notations

  • 0bBBBBBBBB: 8 bit unsigned number written in binary, first digit is the most significant. For example, 0b10000000 is 128.

  • 0xHHHH: number written in hexadecimal, e.g. 0xFFFF is 65535.

  • 0xHH 0xHH ...: byte sequence with bytes written in hexadecimal, e.g. 0xC3 0xA9 (2 bytes) is the character é (U+00E9) encoded to UTF-8.

  • U+HHHH: Unicode character with its code point written in hexadecimal. For example, U+20AC is the “euro sign” character, code point 8,364. Big code point are written with more than 4 hexadecimal digits, e.g. U+10FFFF is the biggest (unallocated) code point of Unicode Character Set 6.0: 1,114,111.

  • A—B: range including start and end. Examples:

    • 0x000x7F is the range 0 through 127 (128 bytes)

    • U+0000—U+00FF is the range 0 through 255 (256 characters)

  • {U+HHHH, U+HHHH, …}: a character string. For example, {U+0041, U+0042, U+0043} is the string “abc” (3 characters).