Question

Why does IDLE handle one symbol correctly but not another?

>>> e = '€'
>>> print unichr(ord(e))
     # looks like a very thin rectangle on my system.
>>> p = '£'
>>> print unichr(ord(p))
£
>>> ord(e)
128
>>> ord(p)
163

I tried adding various # coding lines, but that didn’t help.

EDIT: browser should be UTF-8, else this will look rather strange

EDIT 2: On my system, the euro char is displayed correctly on line 1, but not in the print line. The pound char is displayed correctly both places.

Answer 1

The answer depends what encoding the IDLE REPL is using. You should be more explicit about what’s actually unicode text, and what’s a byte sequence. Meditate on this example:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
c = u'€'
print type(c)
for b in c.encode('utf-8'):
    print ord(b)

c = '€'
print type(c)
for b in c:
    print ord(b)

EDIT:

As for IDLE, it’s kind of borken, and needs to be patched to work correctly.

IDLE 1.2.2      
>>> c = u'€'
>>> ord(c)
128
>>> c.encode('utf-8')
'\xc2\x80'
>>> c
u'\x80'
>>> print c
[the box thingy]


>>> c = u'\u20ac'
>>> ord(c)
8364
>>> c.encode('utf-8')
'\xe2\x82\xac'
>>> c
u'\u20ac'
>>> print c
€

In the first session, by the time the € is interpreted, it has already been mis-encoded, and is unrecoverable.