On Jan 2, 10:44 am, John Machin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Two things for you to do: > > (1) Try these at the Python interactive prompt: > > unicode('', 'latin1') > unicode('', 'mbcs') > unicode('', 'raboof') > unicode('abc', 'latin1') > unicode('abc', 'mbcs') > unicode('abc', 'raboof')
$ python Python 2.5.1 (r251:54869, Apr 18 2007, 22:08:04) [GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5367)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> unicode('', 'mbcs') u'' >>> unicode('abc', 'mbcs') Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> LookupError: unknown encoding: mbcs >>> Hmmn, strange. Same behaviour for "raboof". > (2) Read what the manual (Library Reference -> codecs module -> > standard encodings) has to say about mbcs. Page at http://docs.python.org/lib/standard-encodings.html says that mbcs "purpose": Windows only: Encode operand according to the ANSI codepage (CP_ACP) Do not know what the implications of encoding according to "ANSI codepage (CP_ACP)" are. Windows only seems clear, but why does it only complain when decoding a non-empty string (or when encoding the empty unicode string) ? mario -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list