kdialog and unicode

[dmbkiwi at gmail.com]

John Ridley wrote:
> dmbkiwi wrote:
>
> > I'm trying to get python, unicode and kdialog to play nicely
> together.
> > This is a linux machine, and kdialog is a way to generate dialog
> boxes in
> > kde with which users can interact (for example input text), and you
> can
> > use the outputted text in your script.
> >
> > Anyway, what I'm doing is reading from a utf-8 encoded text file
> using the
> > codecs module, and using the following:
> >
> > data = codecs.open('file', 'r', 'utf-8')
> >
> > I then manipulate the data to break it down into text snippets.
> >
> > Then I run this command:
> >
> >>>> test = os.popen('kdialog --inputbox %s' %(data))
> > Traceback (most recent call last):
> >   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> > UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u017a'
in
> > position 272: ordinal not in range(128)
> >
> > I would really like kdialog display the text as utf-8.  However, it
> seems
> > that python is trying to pass the utf-8 encoded data as ascii,
which
> > obviously fails because it can't deal with the utf-8 encoded text.
> Is it
> > possible to pass the text out to kdialog as utf-8, rather than
ascii?
>
> kdialog will accept a limited form of markup as text, including xml
> character escapes. so you should be able to display polish text
> correctly using this method:
>
> >>> import os
> >>> s = """Wszyscy ludzie rodz\xc4\x85 si\xc4\x99
> ...  wolni i r\xc3\xb3wni pod wzgl\xc4\x99dem
> ...  swej godno\xc5\x9bci i swych praw. S\xc4\x85
> ...  oni obdarzeni rozumem i sumieniem i powinni
> ...  post\xc4\x99powa\xc4\x87 wobec innych w duchu
> ...  braterstwa."""
> >>> s = s.decode('utf-8').encode('ascii','xmlcharrefreplace')
> >>> k = os.popen('kdialog --inputbox "<p>%s</p>"' % s)
>
>
> John Ridley
>
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Interesting - this displays correctly when I run the above code from a
python shell.  However, when I run it as a superkaramba theme (which is
a wrapper interface to some kde functions, but allegedly passes
straight python functions direct to the python interpreter), it shows
up as letters, with &nnn (where nnn is a number) instead of the \xc4
etc.  I need to do some more investigating of this with the
superkaramba developers, and my own machine to see where the problem
lies - clearly it's not in the code I'm using - there's either
something wrong on my machine, or wrong with the way superkaramba
passes this code to the python interpreter.

Thanks for your help.

Matt