German Umlaut Problem with raw_input in IDLE

[Gregor Lingl]

Hi

This message concerns using IDLE with German
alphabet.

Some month ago I copied sitecustomize.py with
appropriate locale-setting to C:\Python22\Lib
thanks to an advice from some other mailing list.

This worked well until today I made the observation,
that in IDLE raw_input doesn't work correctly:

 >>> a = raw_input("Hä? ")
Hä? Tschüs
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#2>", line 1, in ?
    a = raw_input("Hä? ")
TypeError: object.readline() returned non-string
 >>>

Printing Hä? works correctly, reading in Tschüs doesn't!

Consequently I cannot execute programs with
raw_input from IDLE, if the expected answers (inputs)
may contain "Umlaute". Those same programs,
however, can be executed from the commandline.
And also the interactive Python interpreter can execute
raw_input statements even when Umlaute are input.

So I think, this must be a problem of IDLE.
I must confess, I do not understand the error message.

Does somebody know a patch or a workaround?
Thanks

Gregor Lingl