[Python-Dev] IDLE and non-ASCII characters

[Martin von Loewis]

Thanks to a bug report I got, I noticed for the first time that you
cannot enter non-ASCII characters in IDLE anymore. Eg. at the shell
prompt, you may get

>>> s=3D'=E4=F6'
UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

Likewise, when trying to save a file that has non-ASCII characters,
you get a traceback.

Now, I think I understand all the causes of the problem (Tkinter
returning Unicode objects, and so on). However, I'm curious whether
anybody has proposals on how to deal with it.

For saving text files, if Python had an encoding directive, things
might be easier :-) For the shell prompt, I've no idea how to solve
this best.

So any suggestions are welcome.

Regards,
Martin