More precisely, why does sys.ps1 not appear if I set it to a unicode string? This problem is hard for me to describe here because my newsreader is not properly unicode enabled, but here's the gist of it:
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Feb 11 2010, 00:51:29) [GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> First, let's make sure our encodings are set properly: >>> import sys >>> sys.stdin.encoding 'utf-8' >>> sys.stdout.encoding 'utf-8' Looks good. Now, let's make two unicode strings, identical except for one character: >>> s1 = u'%%% %%% ' >>> s2 = u'%%% ' + u'\u262f' + '%%% ' >>> print s1 %%% %%% >>> print s2 %%% /&%%% If this were a properly unicode-enabled newsreader you would see a yin-yang symbol in the middle of s2. Now the weird part: >>> sys.ps1 = s1 %%% %%% sys.ps1 = s2 # This is as expected print s1 # But this isn't. There's no prompt! %%% %%% # Everything still works print s2 %%% /&%%% sys.ps1 = s1 # If we reset sys.ps1 we get our prompt back %%% %%% sys.ps1 = '>>> ' >>> sys.ps1 = u'>>> ' >>> So... why does having a non-ascii character in sys.ps1 make the prompt vanish? (If you're wondering why I care, I want to connect to an interactive python interpreter from another program, and I want a non-ascii delimiter to unambiguously mark the end of the interpreter's output on every interaction.) Thanks, rg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
