Starting point for unicode conversion

Re: Starting point for unicode conversion

Howard Lightstone <howard@eegsoft ware.com> writes:
[color=blue]
> The key point here is Tkinter. I believe (from reading this list) that I
> can expect that SOME returned text may be Unicode (depending on content and
> Windows locale settings).[/color]

Yes, and no. Yes, some returned text may be Unicode, but no, it won't
depend on the locale settings. Instead, Tkinter will return a byte
string if the result contains only ASCII characters, and return a
Unicode string if there are non-ASCII characters.
[color=blue]
> Would it be best to just (somehow) force all text into Unicode or would it
> be "better" to handle specific instances?[/color]

If you are prepared to deal with Unicode, it would be best to force
that throughout. I was contemplating to make this an option in
_tkinter, but that has not been implemented - contributions are
welcome.

Meanwhile, you can use

s = unicode(s)

on all strings returned from Tkinter: if s is an ASCII string, the
default encoding should happily convert it to a Unicode object; if s
is a Unicode string, unicode(s) will be a no-op.
[color=blue]
> I also have the problem of embedded text in data files I create that I have
> to store as *something* that I can fully recover and convert back to
> something reasonable even if the locale changes.[/color]

Don't worry about the locale; it does not matter here.

Regards,
Martin