[Idle-dev] fix indentation and find non-ascii

[Terry Reedy]

On 3/28/2014 2:19 AM, Sean Felipe Wolfe wrote:
> Here's the circumstances that brought this up.
>
> I was helping a new programming student walk through some example
> code, having him both type manually as well as copy + paste from the
> site and we would talk it over.
>
> When it came time to run the module, we ran into a few typos, a few
> indentation errors, a capitalization error, no problem, easy fixes.
> But the script kept failing on two points: one, it claimed that we
> were using non-ascii and needed to declare the file as UTF-8.

Since Py3 expects utf-8 by default, were you using 2.x?  If so, I 
recommend you have new students start with the latest 3.x, partly to 
avoid some unicode problems.

 > Two, it continued to say there was an
 > indentation error after we'd checked itclosely.

'It' is Python, not Idle.

> I eventually exported the file to vim, but there were no indentation problems.

This suggest that there was some other syntax-like problem that caused 
the indentation to seem wrong. But I cannot comment without the code.

> What we ended up doing, was to delete the offending line and type it
> manually on a new line.
>
> This ended up being much more complicated than it needed to be,

I have no idea what you mean. Typing a line is pretty simple.

> I think IDLE could add value here by providing convenience features to
> get a script back to a simple state, both by fixing indentation

I do not know what you mean by 'fix' indentation but no code can read 
your mind. In any case, this is not specifically an Idle issue. I 
already agree that we should make it easier to run or create editing 
tools. Perhaps Tools/Scripts/reindent.py will do what you need. That and 
anything like it should be accessible from Idle.

> well as resetting to a dead-simple charset, do deal with things like
> accented characters

These are legal, especially in Python 3. I am willing to highlight, but 
not blindly remove (and see comment below).

> or stylized curly-quotes.

If a site publishes code mangled with substitute chars, you should 
complain to the site. But besides that, the ability to run str.translate 
on editor window text is a plausible idea.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy