Question

I’m trying to use raw_input() with readline and utf-8 encoding (on OSX 10.6.8).

Imagine the following snippet:

import readline

while True: 
    try:
        inp = raw_input('> ')
    except EOFError:
        break

This works except when trying to type non standard ASCII letters, say ‘å’ or ‘ä’. When doing this no input is written, I guess readline is filtering this somehow.

I then changed the input encoding using

sys.stdin = codecs.getwriter('utf-8')(sys.stdin)

Now typing ‘å’ and ‘ä’ works but it seems the readline functionality is no more.

Any ideas on how to make readline cope with unicode letters?

Answer 1

(Reposting as an answer): OSX ships with an inferior equivalent to readline called libedit (for licensing reasons, it can’t ship readline itself).

You can do easy_install readline to get GNU readline in Python on a Mac.

This also causes a problem for IPython, which now displays an ugly warning if it detects that libedit is in use.