With the assistance of this group I am understanding unicode encoding issues much better; especially when handling special characters that are outside of the ASCII range. I've got my application working perfectly now :-)
However, I am still confused as to why I can only use one specific encoding. I've done some research and it appears that I should be able to use any of the following codecs with codepoints '\xfc' (chr(252)) '\xfd' (chr(253)) and '\xfe' (chr(254)) : ISO-8859-1 [ note that I'm using this codec on my Linux box ] cp1252 cp437 latin1 utf-8 If I'm not mistaken, all of these codecs can handle the complete 8bit character set. However, on Windows 7, I am only able to use 'cp437' to display (print) data with those characters in Python. If I use any other encoding, Windows laughs at me with this error message: File "C:\Python33\lib\encodings\cp437.py", line 19, in encode return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_map)[0] UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\xfd' in position 3: character maps to <undefined> Furthermore I get this from IDLE: >>> import locale >>> locale.getdefaultlocale() ('en_US', 'cp1252') I also get 'cp1252' when running the same script from a Windows command prompt. So there is a contradiction between the error message and the default encoding. Why am I restricted from using just that one codec? Is this a Windows or Python restriction? Please enlighten me. Dan
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