[Tutor] UnicodeDecodeError

[Michael Lange]

Hello list,

I've encountered an (at least for me) weird error in the project I'm working on (see the traceback below).
Unfortunately there are several of my application's modules involved, so I cannot post all of my code here.
I hope I can explain in plain words what I'm doing.

The line in the traceback that seems to cause the problems:

    if self.nextfile == _('No destination file selected'):

"self.nextfile" is a variable that contains either the path to a file (the destination file for sound recording)
or the gettext string you see above.
For some reason I get the error below when "self.nextfile" contains a special character *and* the gettext string
holds the german translation, which contains a special character, too (of course '\xe4' as 23rd character).
It looks like there are no problems when I remove the german translation or when there are no special characters
in the filename, but as soon as I have special characters on both sides of the equation the error occurs.

######################################################################
Error: 1
UnicodeDecodeError Exception in Tk callback
  Function: <bound method Snackrecorder.start of <snackrecorder.Snackrecorder instance at 0xb77fe24c>> (type: <type 'instancemethod'>)
  Args: ()
Traceback (innermost last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/Pmw/Pmw_1_2/lib/PmwBase.py", line 1747, in __call__
    return apply(self.func, args)
  File "/usr/local/share/phonoripper/snackrecorder.py", line 305, in start
    if self.nextfile == _('No destination file selected'):
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 22: ordinal not in range(128)

######################################################################

I've looked into PmwBase.py, but I couldn't figure out what's going on, so I hope that someone
here can give me a hint.

Thanks in advance and best regards

Michael