Python shell wont open idle or an exisiting py file

[Chris Angelico]

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?

ChrisA