using unicode characters with wxPython

Question

hi everybody!

i have a problem with wxpython and his rich text control, when i try to insert unicode characters... \xb2 prints an apex '2', '\u2074' should print an apex '4'...
edit: i use windows vista... and i tried 'coding cp1252 ' and 'utf-8' but with the same result...
2edit: on vista it crashs, on xp it shows a strange square (i guess it's when the pc doesn't recognize the character...)

here is the source code:

from __future__ import unicode_literals

import wx
import wx.richtext as rt

class Trial(wx.Frame):
    def __init__(self):
        wx.Frame.__init__(self, None, -1, 'Prova', 
                size=(400, 400))

        self.rtc = rt.RichTextCtrl(self, style=wx.VSCROLL|wx.HSCROLL|wx.NO_BORDER)
        wx.CallAfter(self.rtc.SetFocus)
        #self.rtc.Freeze()
        self.rtc.BeginFontSize(14)
        self.rtc.WriteText('hei!\xb2') #alright
        self.rtc.WriteText('hi\u2074!')#crash
        self.rtc.EndFontSize()
        
       
if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = wx.PySimpleApp()
    frame = Trial()
    frame.Show()
    app.MainLoop()

but when i try to run it, it crashs...

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>
    frame = display.Trial()
  File "C:\Users\expert\Desktop\display.py", line 15, in __init__
    self.rtc.WriteText('hi\u2074!')
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\wx-2.8-msw-ansi\wx\richtext.py", line 2507, in WriteText
    return _richtext.RichTextCtrl_WriteText(*args, **kwargs)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 12, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_table)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\u2074' in position 4: character maps to <undefined>

so...what sould i do? i really need to show it...

thanks everybody!!

Answer 1

This can sometimes occur if you forget to set your encoding. Put this at the top of the code:

# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

before any code including comments but after the shebang (#!/usr/bin/python)

Answer 2

If you want Unicode support then you should be using the unicode version of wxpython.

There are two versions of wxPython for each of the supported Python versions on Win32. They are nearly identical, except one of them has been compiled with support for the Unicode version of the platform APIs. Unless you've been told differently, you probably want to get the Unicode build of wxPython.

Most other platforms also have two versions.

It works fine if you pass the actual symbols e.g

self.rtc.WriteText("hei!²")