[FIXED] Why is an empty string returned from hanzi.to_pinyin()?

Issue

http://dragonmapper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/readme.html

I'm trying to use dragonmapper to convert characters to pinyin, and I'm trying the tutorial but I'm stuck. http://dragonmapper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorial.html

from dragonmapper import hanzi
s = '这个字怎么念？' 
pinyin = hanzi.to_pinyin(s)

At this point pinyin is an empty string u''. What am I doing wrong?

(also asked here: https://github.com/tsroten/dragonmapper/issues/11)

Solution

Aha, I forgot to mark the string as unicode:

s = u'这个字怎么念？'

alternatively, make strings unicode:

from __future__ import unicode_literals

Answered By - astromme