python: lower() german umlauts

Question

I have a problem with converting uppercase letters with umlauts to lowercase ones. ``` print("ÄÖÜAOU".lower()) ``` The A, O and the U gets converted properly but the Ä,Ö and Ü stays uppercase. Any ideas? First problem is fixed with the .decode('utf-8') but I still have a second one: ``` # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- original_message="ÄÜ".decode('utf-8') original_message=original_message.lower() original_message=original_message.replace("ä", "x") print(original_message) ``` Traceback (most recent call last): File "Untitled.py", line 4, in original_message=original_message.replace("ä", "x") UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Accepted Answer

You'll need to mark it as a unicode string unless you're working with plain ASCII;

```
> print(u"ÄÖÜAOU".lower())

äöüaou
```

It works the same when working with variables, it all depends on the type assigned to the variable to begin with.

```
> olle = "ÅÄÖABC"
> print(olle.lower())
ÅÄÖabc

> olle = u"ÅÄÖABC"
> print(olle.lower())
åäöabc
```

python: lower() german umlauts

Solution

Problem