How to find out if Python is compiled with UCS-2 or UCS-4?

python unicode ucs2
Sridhar Ratnakumar picture Sridhar Ratnakumar · Sep 18, 2009 · Viewed 39.9k times · Source

Just what the title says.

$ ./configure --help | grep -i ucs
  --enable-unicode[=ucs[24]]

Searching the official documentation, I found this:

sys.maxunicode: An integer giving the largest supported code point for a Unicode character. The value of this depends on the configuration option that specifies whether Unicode characters are stored as UCS-2 or UCS-4.

What is not clear here is - which value(s) correspond to UCS-2 and UCS-4.

The code is expected to work on Python 2.6+.

Answer

Stef picture Stef · Sep 18, 2009

When built with --enable-unicode=ucs4:

>>> import sys
>>> print sys.maxunicode
1114111

When built with --enable-unicode=ucs2:

>>> import sys
>>> print sys.maxunicode
65535

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