Question about encoding, I need a clue ...

[Geoff Wright]

Hi,

I use Mac OSX for development but deploy on a Linux server.  (Platform details provided below).

When the locale is set to FR_CA, I am not able to display a u circumflex consistently across the two machines even though the default encoding is set to "ascii" on both machines.  Specifically, calendar.month_name[8] returns a ? (question mark) on the Linux server whereas it displays properly on the Mac OSX system.  However, if I take the result from calendar.month_name[8] and run it through the following function .... unicode(calendar.month_name[8],"latin1") ... then the u circumflex displays correctly on the Linux server but does not display correctly on my Mac.

Of course, I could work around this problem with a relatively simple if statement but these issues are going to show up all over my application so even a simple if statement will start to get cumbersome.

I guess what it boils down to is that I would like to get a better handle on what is going on so that I will know how best to work through future encoding issues.  Thanks in advance for any advice.

Here are the specifics of my problem.

On my Mac:

Python 2.6.7 (r267:88850, Jul 30 2011, 23:46:53) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)] on darwin

>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,'fr_CA')
'fr_CA'
>>> import sys
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'
>>> import calendar
>>> calendar.month_name[8]
'ao\xc3\xbbt'
>>> print calendar.month_name[8]
août
>>> print unicode(calendar.month_name[8],"latin1")
août

On the linux server:

uname -a
Linux alhena 2.6.32.8-grsec-2.1.14-modsign-xeon-64 #2 SMP Sat Mar 13 00:42:43 PST 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Jan 24 2010, 17:44:40) 
[GCC 4.3.2] on linux2

>>> import locale,sys,calendar
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,'fr_CA')
'fr_CA'
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'
>>> calendar.month_name[8]
'ao\xfbt'
>>> print calendar.month_name[8]
ao?t
>>> print unicode(calendar.month_name[8],"latin1")
août