string module

[Fernando Pérez]

Fernando Pérez wrote:

>> For example, string.uppercase has the following values:
>> 
>> ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ\xC0\xC1\xC2....\xCde
>> 
> 
>>>> import string
>>>> string.uppercase
> 
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ\xc0\xc1\xc2\xc3\xc4\xc5\xc6\xc7\xc8\xc9\xca\xcb\xcc\xcd\xce\xcf\xd0\xd1\xd2\xd3\xd4\xd5\xd6\xd8\xd9\xda\xdb\xdc\xdd\xde'
>>>> print string.uppercase
> ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖØÙÚÛÜÝÞ
> 

But now I'm totally confused. The above works at a python prompt, but the 
simple program
 
import string
print string.__file__
print string.uppercase

executed at the system prompt gives:

[~]> python t.py
/usr/lib/python2.2/string.pyc
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Huh??? How can the python shell get a different value? I checked in the 
interactive prompt and string.__file__ does point to the same file as 
indicated above. So how in the world do I get the extra accented chars shoved 
into string.uppercase? The relevant section in /usr/lib/python2.2/string.py:

# Some strings for ctype-style character classification
whitespace = ' \t\n\r\v\f'
lowercase = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
uppercase = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
letters = lowercase + uppercase

I'd very much appreciate someone who could explain who is putting the extra 
chars into these module constants when at the python prompt.

Cheers,

f.