[Tutor] ipython / readline problem

[Kent Johnson]

Tiago Saboga wrote:
> <type 'exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError'>: 'ascii' codec can't encode
> character u'\xe7' in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)
> 
> =======================================
> 
> What's happening? Why do the readline methods accept a multibyte
> string ('ação') but not a unicode (u'ação')?

I don't know what is happening with readline but this error is usually 
the result of converting a Unicode string to a plain string without 
specifying encoding, either explicitly by calling str() or implicitly 
such as in a print statement:

In [3]: u='a\303\247\303\243o'.decode('utf-8')
In [4]: print u
------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<ipython console>", line 1, in <module>
<type 'exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError'>: 'ascii' codec can't encode 
characters in position 1-2: ordinal not in range(128)

In [5]: str(u)
------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "<ipython console>", line 1, in <module>
<type 'exceptions.UnicodeEncodeError'>: 'ascii' codec can't encode 
characters in position 1-2: ordinal not in range(128)

Kent