[Tutor] Re: printing special characters

[dman]

[...]
| Is there a cross-platform way to print special characters such as
| the degree symbol in a Python program?

If you can use Unicode, the degree symbol is character is 00B0.  I
used that recently in a small java/swing program I had to write.  It
does, of course, depend on the environment the user has.  If the
environment is "archaic"[1] then you probably can't print any special
symbols like that.

With python 1.5.2 on a Debian Woody system running in gnome-terminal
version 1.4.0 and the fonts I have installed, 
    print chr( 0xB0 )
works just fine.  (hmm, 1.5.2 doesn't even have unicode.  Maybe that
character is in iso8859 too?)

-D


[1]  By "archaic" I mean a system that can only handle pure-ASCII
     (7 bits).  I think these systems are all too common these days.
     The conversion to unicode is quite slow.