Python shell wont open idle or an exisiting py file

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 4:46 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> On 1/31/2014 10:36 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 1:54 PM, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think that some years ago I heard about a variation on UTF-8
>>> (Microsoft?) where codepoint U+0000 is encoded as 0xC0 0x80 so that the
>>> null byte can be used as the string terminator.
>>>
>>> I had a look on Wikipedia found this:
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null-terminated_string
>>
>>
>> Yeah, it's a common abuse of UTF-8. It's a violation of spec, but an
>> understandable one. However, I don't understand why the first part -
>> why should \0 become U+0000 but (presumably) the \a later on
>> (...cs\accel...) doesn't become U+0007, etc?
>
>
> Because only  \0 has a special meaning in a C string, and Tk is written in C
> and uses C strings.

Eh? I've used \a in C programs (not often but I have used it).

It's possible that \0 is the only one that actually bombs anything
(because of C0 80 representation). But since \7 and \a both represent
0x07 in a C string, I would expect there to be other problems, if it's
interpreting it as source. Ah well! Weird weird.

ChrisA