[Idle-dev] IDLE has problem with Umlaute

[Gregor Lingl]

Hi!

In my class (at a Viennese Highschool) there
occured the following problem, which - if not
solved - would enforce a seriously restricted
use of IDLE:

We use Python2.2.
When trying to save the following fancy program

print "Größtes Problem: Umlaute"

from an IDLE editor window, I got the error
messages:


>>> Exception in Tkinter callback
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python22\lib\lib-tk\Tkinter.py", line 1292, in __call__
    return apply(self.func, args)
  File "C:\Python22\Tools\idle\IOBinding.py", line 136, in save_as
    if self.writefile(filename):
  File "C:\Python22\Tools\idle\IOBinding.py", line 154, in writefile
    f.write(chars)
UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

So IDLE seems to prohibit the use of "ÄÖÜäöüß" . For German native
speakers i consider this to be a serious drawback, especially when
using it with students.

Shortly I'd prefer to teach programming instead of teaching to
avoid Umlaute.

As far as I remember we had previous Python versions, which
did NOT show this 'feature'.

=================================================
!!!  Is there a patch to repair this problem? !!!
=================================================

Wouldn't it be a nice idea to have an IDLE, which is able to digest
German texts at the EURO-Python-Conference?

a bit desparately

Gregor