A question on Encoding and Decoding.

[rbsharp at gmx.de]

Hello,
I think this remark is more to the point. In my experience, the general
problem is that python operates with the default encoding "ascii" as in
sys.getdefaultencoding(). It is possible to set the defaultencoding in
sitecustomize.py, with sys.setdefaultencoding('latin1'). I have placed
sitecustomize.py in Lib/site-packages. It is not possible to set the
encoding once python has started. Setting the encoding only works if
you can bind yourself to this one encoding and is therefore no general
fix.
The only reasonable way to work is to get your strings into unicode
(and sometimes back out again).
If for instance you type:
s = "äÄöÖüÜß" and then try
us = unicode(s) you will get a traceback identical to yours.
However:
us = unicode(s,'latin1')
will work. If however to try:
print us
you will get another traceback.

try:
>>> print "%r" % us
u'\x84\x8e\x94\x99\x81\x9a\xe1'
Even if it is not pretty, at least the program won't crash.
You can get a better result with:
>>> print us.encode('latin1')
äÄöÖüÜß

The whole topic can get tedious at times, but be assured,
PyExcelerator, for writing, and xlrd for reading Excel files do work,
with unicode, both in the content and in the sheetnames. PyExcelerator
may be able to read Excel Sheets but not nearly as well as xlrd, which
works wonderfully.

regards,
Richard Sharp


Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> "kath" wrote:
>
> > Also python IDLE is able to output the same character corretly when I
> > say print and why not I?
>
> probably because IDLE's interactive window is Unicode-aware, but your terminal
> is not.
> 
> </F>