pydoc3.5 borks on my Mac

[Peter Otten]

Skip Montanaro wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 11:20 AM, Peter Otten <__peter__ at web.de> wrote:
>> Try setting the environment variable
>>
>> PYTHONIOENCODING=UTF-8
> 
> Thanks, but that didn't help. I still get the same exception.

The pager is invoked by os.popen(), and after some digging I find that it 
uses a io.TestIOWrapper() to write the help text. This in turn uses
locale.getpreferredencoding(False), i. e. you were right to set LANG and 
PYTHONIOENCODING is not relevant.

I'm able to provoke what I think causes your problem on linux with Python 3.4:

$ LANG=en_US.utf-8 python3 -c 'import os; os.popen("cat", "w").write("\xe4\n")'
ä
$ LANG=en_US.ascii python3 -c 'import os; os.popen("cat", "w").write("\xe4\n")'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xe4' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Perhaps LANG=en_US.utf-8 is not understood by your system (uppercase UTF-8? I really don't know the Mac).

What does

$ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 python3 -c 'import locale; print(locale.getpreferredencoding(False))'
UTF-8

print?