Unicode string not accepted as parameter to modification

[Jon Black]

I tried to pass the unit type during a conversion as a unicode string...

q = pq.Quantity([10,], u"kg")
q.units = u"kg"

...and got the following error for both lines...

TypeError: units must be a quantity, string, or dimensionality, got <type 'unicode'>

I would expect this to work. Firstly, because unicode is a string with a certain encoding (utf-8), and secondly because to me u"kg" and "kg" represent the same symbol.

[Jon Black (juan-black)]

I noticed that you can set unicode in the markup:

from quantities import markup
markup.config.use_unicode = True # or False

This had no affect; I still got the same error message.

[Darren Dale (dsdale24)]

Setting unicode in markup only effects the presentation of units when you ask for a string representation str(my_quantity). That is a feature, not a bug.

Concerning the original report, this is fixed in the trunk. When specifying units with a string, that string needs to be valid python. So it is ok to use u"ohm", but not "Ω". This limitation should be lifted once quantities is available for python-3.