Print formatted Strings with Umlauts

[Joerg Lehmann]

I am using Python 2.2.3 (Fedora Core 1). The problem is, that strings containing
umlauts do not work as I would expect. Here is my example:

>>> a = 'äöü'
>>> b = '123'
>>> print "%-5s %-5s\n%-5s %-5s" % (a,a,b,b)
äöü äöü
123   123

I would expect, that the displayed width of a or b is the same: 5 characters.
I also see, that len(a) is 6 (2 bytes per umlaut), whereas len(b) is 3:

>>> print len(a), len(b)
6 3

I have tried to set the encoding in site.py to 'latin-1', but it did not change
my results. Is there no way to store umlauts in 1 byte??? What is the right way
to print strings containing umlauts in a tabular way (same field width)?

Thanks!
--
Joerg Lehmann