[Tkinter-discuss] listdir

[Michael Lange]

Hi,

On Fri, 16 Feb 2018 08:49:01 +0000
Vasilis Vlachoudis <Vasilis.Vlachoudis at cern.ch> wrote:

> Thank you Michael,
> 
> my locale is UTF-8 when I get the error
> 
> $ locale
> LANG=en_US.UTF-8
> LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
> LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
> ...
> LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

ok. Don't know if it is possible that there is something in the configuration
that stops python from properly detecting the system encoding? Some ten
years ago (while using Python 2.3 :) I wrote myself a function that tries
to detect the system encoding (see below); since it is so old some of the things
that function does may be obsolete now, but I still use it today in
a number of my projects and it still works. If you like you can run this
snippet as a test script and see what it says.
Of course it is also well possible that my guess was wrong and the problem
lies somewhere else.

Best regards

Michael

###################################################
import codecs
import locale

def _find_codec(encoding):
    # return True if the requested codec is available, else return False
    try:
        codecs.lookup(encoding)
        return 1
    except (TypeError, LookupError):
        return 0

def _sysencoding():
    # try to guess the system default encoding
    # this is mainly stolen from IDLE's IOBinding.py
    # thanks for guidance to Martin v. Loewis
    locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")# don't mess the numeric types here, we might replace the decimal point with a comma and break Tk!
    try:
        enc = locale.getpreferredencoding()
        if enc and _find_codec(enc):
            return enc
    except AttributeError:
        # our python is too old, try something else
        pass
    try:
        enc = locale.nl_langinfo(locale.CODESET)
        if enc and _find_codec(enc):
            return enc
    except AttributeError:
        pass
    # the last try
    try:
        enc = locale.getdefaultlocale()[1]
        if enc and _find_codec(enc):
            return enc
    except ValueError:
        pass
    # aargh, nothing good found, fall back to ascii and hope for the best
    print 'warning: unable to find usable encoding, using ascii.'
    return 'ascii'

print(_sysencoding().lower())

###################################################


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