For some reason Python (on Windows) doesn't use the system's default character set and that's a serious problem for me. I need to process German textfiles (containing umlauts and other > 7bit ASCII characters) and generally work with strings which need to be processed using the local encoding (I need to display the text using a Tk-based GUI for example). The only solution I managed to find was converting between unicode and latin-1 all the time (the textfiles aren't unicode, the output of the program isn't supposed to be unicode either). Everything worked fine until I tried to run the program on a Windows 9x machine.. It seems that Python on Win9x doesn't really support unicode (IIRC Win9x doesn't have real unicode support so that's not suprising). Is it possible to tell Python to use an 8bit charset (latin-1 in my case) for textfile and string processing by default?
copx -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
