Tkinter disregards font encoding

[Martin v. Löwis]

hjwidmaier at web.de (Hans-Joachim Widmaier) writes:

> My code's like this:
> Font   = '-*-helvetica-bold-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15'
> 
>     w = Label(master, font=Font, textvariable=self.priceVar,
> justify=RIGHT)
> 
> But I do not get the expected Euro sign; Tk uses definitely the
> *-iso8859-1 variant. The -15 is installed, I can use it with other
> applications and look at it with xfd.

What is the value of self.priceVar?

> Does anyone have an idea how I might circumvent that problem?

Here is my theory: you are using a Latin-1 locale, and use a byte
string for the priceVar, where you use '\xe4' to denote the EURO SIGN.
However, in Latin-1, '\xe4' denotes the CURRENCY SIGN. Tk tries to
convert the local encoding (latin-1) into the font encoding (latin-9);
since latin-9 does not support the CURRENCY SIGN, this conversion
fails.

Instead, you should use a Unicode string to denote the EURO SIGN,
which would be u'\u20ac'.

HTH,
Martin