Python shell wont open idle or an exisiting py file

[Terry Reedy]

On 1/31/2014 8:52 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 12:45 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>> H:\HP_Documents\0PythonWork\AirplaneKinematics\accel2.py
>> caused this message
>> UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xc0 in position 14:
>> invalid start byte
>
> So... something's interpreting \0 as codepoint U+0000 (which it
> shouldn't), storing that in "UTF-8" as 0xC0 0x80 (which it shouldn't),
> and then giving it to Python to decode.

Right. Which is why it puzzled me. Credit Serhiy for unraveling this and 
fixing it.

 > That's a weird little combination bug right there.

Which started with Microsoft's decision to reuse the string excape 
character '\' as a directory separator.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy