Bug report

Bug description:

Consider the following:

import unicodedata
unicodedata.name('')

unicodedata.name('a')

unicodedata.name('\x00')

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#1>", line 1, in <module>
    unicodedata.name('')
TypeError: name() argument 1 must be a unicode character, not str

'LATIN SMALL LETTER A'

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#1>", line 1, in <module>
    unicodedata.name('\x00')
ValueError: no such name

It seems there are two issues here:

1. unicodedata.name() and possibly other unicodedata methods can have an undocumented TypeError exception. https://docs.python.org/3/library/unicodedata.html
2. The TypeError on an empty string doesn't really seem accurate, since the function can still take other string values of the same str type.

Either TypeError should be mentioned in documentation, or the handling of empty strings should be fixed in the library to return a ValueError instead.

CPython versions tested on:

3.12

Operating systems tested on:

Windows, Other

Linked PRs

• gh-117557: Improve error message for 'C' format if given string is not 1 char long #117558
• gh-117557: Improve error messages when a string, bytes or bytearray of length 1 are expected #117631