IDLE and unicode chars (2.5.4)

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.

Answer 2

The problem is probably that your font doesn't have the proper glyphs. In addition to getting the encoding right, you have to have the proper font when presenting the text in the IDLE ui. Try using a different font to see if it helps (Arial Unicode has a very large glyph complement, for example).

The euro symbol is much newer than the pounds sterling symbol, so your font may not have a euro glyph.