[Python-Dev] IDLE and non-ASCII characters

[Martin von Loewis]

> I have a bug report assigned to myself which indicates similar
> problems with _tkinter and Tk/Tcl. There were other problem
> reports on the German Python mailing list going in the same
> direction too.
> 
> The basic problem seems to be that Tk/Tcl applies too much
> magic to the text widget contents in order to find out the
> used encoding and this can easily cause the whole encoding
> mechanism to fail.

This is actually a different problem. In this scenario here, the user
types non-ASCII character into a text widget, then _tkinter returns a
Unicode object (IMO rightfully so). In the other problem, the Python
program puts a byte string into a text widget, the user enters some
more characters, and _tkinter returns a byte string which does not
follow any encoding.

> A Tk/Tcl expert should really look into this and fix _tkinter.c
> to aid Tk/Tcl in not mixing up the encodings (e.g. it would
> probably be a good idea to recode Python 8bit-strings into
> whatever encoding Tk/Tcl assumes as default).

Again, this is not the issue here: Both _tkinter and Tk behave
absolutely correct IMO. The question is how IDLE should deal with it.

Regards,
Martin