CP65001 fails (was re: ...)

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 14 Dec 2013 13:43:41 -0500, Terry Reedy wrote:

> This was reported by Victor Stinner as part of
> http://bugs.python.org/issue19914
> to explain how cp65001 causes behavior like this with Python's
> interactive help() function (which more for paging on Windows).
> 
>  >>> help(str)
> Not enough memory.


Terry, I see you have closed the bug report. I think you were a little 
hasty. The ultimate cause of the bug may be the failure of Window's 
"more" command when the code-page is set to CP-65001, but that doesn't 
necessarily imply that Python shouldn't, or can't, do something about it.

The interactive help system already supports different pagers, depending 
on the environment. I think that it could fall back on a more primitive 
pager if the preferred one fails. The relevant code is the pager() and 
getpager() functions in the pydoc module. The patch won't be trivial, but 
I think it can be done, and I think it should be done. Although possibly 
for Python 3.5 rather than a bug-fix version. Your thoughts?



-- 
Steven