Unicode error in wx_gdi ?

[Serge Orlov]

Erik  Bethke wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I still shaking out my last few bugs in my tile matching game:
>
> I am now down to one stumper for me:
>  1) when I initialize wxPython
>  2) from an exe that I have created with py2exe
>  3) when the executable is located on the desktop as opposed to
> somewhere on C or D directly
>  4) when My Desktop is not written in ascii but instead Korean hangul
>
> I get this error:
>
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "shanghai.py", line 13, in ?
>   File "wxPython\__init__.pyc", line 10, in ?
>   File "wxPython\_wx.pyc", line 3, in ?
>   File "wxPython\_core.pyc", line 15, in ?
>   File "wx\__init__.pyc", line 42, in ?
>   File "wx\_core.pyc", line 10994, in ?
>   File "wx\_gdi.pyc", line 2443, in ?
>   File "wx\_gdi.pyc", line 2340, in Locale_AddCatalogLookupPathPrefix
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xbf in position
> 26: ordinal not in range(128)
>
> Granted this may seem like an obscure error,

Thanks to your explanation, it doesn't look very obscure. I think
the code in wxpython either uses sys.path[0] or __file__. Python
still keeps byte strings in there because of backward compatibility.


> What do i do from here?  Do I go into wx_gdi.py and fix it so that it
> uses unicode instead of ascii?  I have not yet made any changes to
> other people's libraries...

You should contact wxpython people for proper cross platform fix,
meanwhile you can fix that particular error on windows
by changing sys.path[0] into
sys.path[0].decode(sys.getfilesystemencoding())
or do the same thing for __file__. If there are a lot of similar
problems, you can call sys.setdefaultencoding('mbcs') at the start of
your program as last resort. Don't tell anyone I suggested that :)
and remember that sys.setdefaultencoding is removed in site.py,
changing default encoding can mask encoding bugs and make those
bugs hard to trace.

  Serge.