PyCon UK 2025

Marie Roald

Marie is a researcher, data scientist and educator with over eight years experience teaching Python to middle- and high-school students, teachers and professionals in Norway. As part of her work as a researcher at the Norwegian Language Bank at the National Library of Norway, Marie has first-hand experience dealing with the intricacies of Unicode. Marie is also a co-founder and organiser of PyLadies Oslo.


Session

09-21
14:00
25min
Why `len('😶‍🌫️') == 4` and other weird things you should know about strings in Python
Marie Roald, Yngve Mardal Moe

Strings in Python behave in all sorts of unexpected ways: len('😶‍🌫️') == 4, 'ñ' != 'ñ', '‮dlrow olleh‬'‬.split()[1] == 'olleh‬'! How is this possible? And importantly, why should you care?

Main stage