kdialog and unicode

[Dumbkiwi]

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 11:41:01 +0200, Peter Otten wrote:

> Dumbkiwi 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')
> 
> data is now a unicode string.
> 
> 
>> 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?
> 
> Just encode the data in the target encoding before passing it to
> os.popen():
> 
> test = os.popen('kdialog --inputbox %s' % data.encode("utf-8"))
> 
> Peter

I had tried that, but then the text looks like crap.  The text I'm using
for this is Polish, and there are a lot of non-English characters in
there. Using this method results in some strange characters - basically it
looks like a file encoded in utf-8, but displayed using iso-8859-1.

Is this the best I can do?

Thanks for your help.

Matt