A python IDE for teaching that supports cyrillic i/o

[Leo Kislov]

Kirill Simonov wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Could anyone suggest me a simple IDE suitable for teaching Python as a
> first programming language to high school students?  It is necessary
> that it has a good support for input/output in Cyrillic.
>
> Unfortunately, most IDEs I tried failed miserably in this respect.  My
> test was simple: I've run the code
>     name = raw_input("What's your name? ")  # written in Russian
>     print "Hello, %s!" % name               # in Russian as well
> both from the shell and as a standalone script. This either caused a
> UnicodeError or just printed invalid characters.
>
> For the record, I've checked IDLE, PythonWin, Eric, DrPython, SPE, and
> WingIDE.  The only ones that worked are WingIDE and IDLE (under Linux,
> but not under Windows).

IDLE on Windows works fine for your example in interactive console:

>>> name = raw_input("What's your name? ")
What's your name? Леонид
>>> print name
Леонид
>>> name
u'\u041b\u0435\u043e\u043d\u0438\u0434'

and as a script:

What's your name? Леонид
Hello, Леонид!
<type 'unicode'>
>>>

That is IDLE + python 2.4 on Windows. So I'm not sure what is the
problem. In other messages you seems to be talking about system
console. Why? It's not part of IDE.

And another question: are you aware of the fact that recommended way to
handle non-ascii characters is to use unicode type? Most of IDEs should
work fine with unicode. 

  -- Leo