IDLE and non-ascii encoding workaround?

[klappnase]

Hello everyone,

there have already been a couple of threads about IDLE's sometimes
annoying disability to use special characters (in my case I would like
to use for example german umlauts like "ä" etc.).
I have made a workaround that *seems* to work, so I can at least store
files in the editor that use such characters ( on the python shell I
still get:

  UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

but that does not matter much to me).
However I don't know very much about encoding issues, so maybe someone
can tell me if there might be problems that I don't see at the moment.
Here's what I did:

I changed one line in the writefile function in IOBinding.py into a
try-except statement. My function now looks like this:

    def writefile(self, filename):
        self.fixlastline()
        #chars = str(self.text.get("1.0", "end-1c"))#original line
        #workaround to fix the "umlaut" problem:
        try:
            chars = str(self.text.get("1.0", "end-1c"))
        except:
            c = self.text.get("1.0", "end-1c")
            chars = ''
            for i in c:
                j = ord(i)
                k = chr(j)
                chars = chars + k
            chars = str(chars)
        #end of workaround
        try:
            f = open(filename, "w")
            f.write(chars)
            f.close()
            ## print "saved to", `filename`
            return 1
        except IOError, msg:
            tkMessageBox.showerror("I/O Error", str(msg),
                                   master=self.text)
            return 0

This may take a few seconds if you want to save a large file, but at
least it is better as if it wasn't possible at all.

Any hints on this would be very appreciated.
Thanks in anticipation.

Michael