kdialog and unicode

[dmbkiwi at gmail.com]

John Machin wrote:
> On 26 Apr 2005 13:39:26 -0700, dmbkiwi at gmail.com (dumbkiwi) wrote:
>
> >Peter Otten <__peter__ at web.de> wrote in message
news:<d4l92e$9di$05$1 at news.t-online.com>...
> >> Dumbkiwi wrote:
> >>
> >> >> Just encode the data in the target encoding before passing it
to
> >> >> os.popen():
>
> >
> >Anyway, from your post, I've done some more digging, and found the
> >command:
> >
> >sys.setappdefaultencoding()
> >
> >which I've used, and it's fixed the problem (I think).
> >
>
> Dumb Kiwi, eh? Maybe not so dumb -- where'd you find
> sys.setappdefaultencoding()? I'm just a dumb Aussie [1]; I looked in
> the 2.4.1 docs and also did import sys; dir(sys) and I can't spot it.

Hmmm. See post above, seems to be something generated by eric3.  So
this may not be the fix I'm looking for.

>
> In any case, how could the magical sys.setappdefaultencoding() fix
> your problem? From your description, your problem appeared to be that
> you didn't know what encoding to use.

I knew what encoding to use, the problem was that the text was being
passed to kdialog as ascii.  The .encode('utf-8') at least allows
kdialog to run, but the text still looks like crap.  Using
sys.setappdefaultencoding() seemed to help.  The text looked a bit
better - although not entirely perfect - but I think that's because the
font I was using didn't have the correct characters (they came up as
square boxes).
>
> What is the essential difference between
>
>    send(u_data.encode('polish'))
>
> and
>
>    sys.setappdefaultencoding('polish')
>    ...
>    send(u_data)

Not sure - I'm new to character encoding, and most of this seems like
black magic to me.

>
> [1]: Now that's *TWO* contenders for TautologyOTW :-)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> John

Matt