Jython 2.1 and Cheetah:Cyrillic templates output mixed encoding

[Mike Grigorov]

I am using cheetah with jython 2.1 and I have problem generating templates
that contain cyrillic text. Some texts are printed OK and others are not. 

I searched Jython and cheetah projects mailing lists on sourceforge.net as 
well as these groups and tried some other fixes proposed but without success.

I call the template like this:

    PythonInterpreter pyiInterp = new PythonInterpreter();
    pyiInterp.set("textTool", TextToolkit.getInstance());
    String _body = readFile(strTemplateFile.replace('\\', '/'));

//----Encoding:
    PyString _pyBody = new PyString(_body);
//----

    pyiInterp.set("templBody", _pyBody);
    ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    PrintWriter pwOut = new PrintWriter(bos);
    pyiInterp.setOut(pwOut);
    pyiInterp.exec("from Cheetah.Template import Template");
    pyiInterp.exec("t = Template(source=templBody)");
    pyiInterp.exec("t.textTool = textTool");
    pyiInterp.exec("print t");

I tried replacing the section marked as //---Encoding: 
    String isoScript = _body;
    try {
      //The call to sun.io.Converters.getDefaultEncodingName() returns "Cp1251"
      byte[] bytes = _body.getBytes(sun.io.Converters.getDefaultEncodingName()); 
      isoScript = new String(bytes, "ISO-8859-1");
    }
    catch (Exception ex) {
      System.out.println("CONVERSION ERROR:" + ex);
    }
    PyString _pyBody = new PyString(isoScript);


This resulted in the problem inverted - the 'good' text became 'bad' and vice versa.

Here are sample lines one of which prints good text and the second - not 
good(depending on its position in the template) /I guess text will be garbled 
here/ :

${textTool.filler(35, " ")}????????? ????
${textTool.filler(35, " ")}???????????? ?? ??????????

textTool is a java object and this call produces 35 spaces

The encoding of the lines is the same(I checked the int values for the
letters). 


I tried:

import sys
sys.setdefaultencoding('cp1251')

It didn't help but it caused compilation of the encodings\cp1251.py module ->
cp1251$py.class so I guess it was taken into account

Please guide me to papers that can help solving this or propose ideas what 
might be causing this behaviour.

Thanks for your cooperation 
Mike