Problems with Unicode Plane 1 characters on Windows

[Fredrik Lundh]

Edin Salković wrote:

> Why doesn't the following code work on Windows XP, although it works
> on Linux (Ubuntu 6.06). Both versions are of Python are 2.4, and both
> OSs are on the same PC.
> 
>>>> import unicodedata
>>>> unicodedata.name(U'\U0001d400')
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> TypeError: need a single Unicode character as parameter
> 
> The output should say:
> MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL A

hint:

 >>> len(u'\U0001d400')
2

Python's Unicode system uses 16-bit values internally on some platforms, 
and 32-bit values on some platforms.  on 16-bit platforms, code points 
outside the BMP are stored as surrogate pairs.

also see:

     http://pyref.infogami.com/type-unicode

</F>