In article <mailman.159.1718991773.2909.python-l...@python.org>, ros...@gmail.com says... > > If you switch to a Linux system, it should work correctly, and you'll > be able to migrate the rest of the way onto Python 3. Once you achieve > that, you'll be able to operate on Windows or Linux equivalently, > since Python 3 solved this problem. At least, I *think* it will; my > current system has a Python 2 installed, but doesn't have tkinter > (because I never bothered to install it), and it's no longer available > from the upstream Debian repos, so I only tested it in the console. > But the decoding certainly worked.
Thank you for the idea of trying it on a Linux system. I did so, and my example code generated the error: _tkinter.TclError: character U+1f40d is above the range (U+0000-U+FFFF) allowed by Tcl So it looks like the problem is ultimately due to a limitation of Tcl/Tk. I'm still not sure why it doesn't give an error on Windows and instead either works (when UTF-8 encoding is specified) or converts the out-of-range characters to ones it can display (when the encoding isn't specified). But now I know what the root of the problem is, I can deal with it appropriately (and my curiosity is at least partly satisfied). This has given me a much better understanding of what I need to do in order to migrate to Python 3 and add proper support for non-ASCII characters, so I'm very grateful for your help! Thanks, Rayner -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list