problem with cjkcodecs on Mandrake linux

[Anthony Liu]

The superuser of the Mandrake system in my lab
installed cjkcodecs for python.

But there is a problem.

I can encode english alphabets like 'a', 'b', 'c' or
'abc' like so:

s = 'abc'
s = unicode(s, 'gbk')
print s # prints 'abc'

but when I tried to encode Chinese strings, I have a
problem.

For example, to run the following script:

s = "蟒蛇" # 2 Chinese characters for
python
s = unicode(s, 'gbk')
print s

I get the following error message.

[antony@ancho tmp]$ python snake.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "snake.py", line 6, in ?
print a
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode
characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(256)
[antony@ancho tmp]$

What is the problem please?
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam
http://mail.yahoo.com

[Erik Max Francis]

Anthony Liu wrote:

I get the following error message.

[antony@ancho tmp]$ python snake.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "snake.py", line 6, in ?
print a
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode
characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(256)
[antony@ancho tmp]$

What is the problem please?

The problem is the default encoding is Latin-1, presumably because
that's the only thing your xterm/virtual console understands. So Python
is rightly complaining that it can't print the Chinese characters for
you.

--
__ Erik Max Francis && ma*@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/ \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && &tSftDotIotE
\__/ In this world, nothing is certain but death and taxes.
-- Benjamin Franklin

[Skip Montanaro]

Anthony> But I am using gbcxterm, which displays Chinese very well,
Anthony> plus, I think I can also input Chinese using this terminal.
Anthony> Then why do I still have this problem?

Look in your installed site.py file for the encoding variable and change it
as you like. The default is "ascii". Sounds like your sys admin may have
changed it to "latin-1".

Skip

[Michael Hudson]

Skip Montanaro <sk**@pobox.com> writes:

Anthony> But I am using gbcxterm, which displays Chinese very well,
Anthony> plus, I think I can also input Chinese using this terminal.
Anthony> Then why do I still have this problem?

Look in your installed site.py file for the encoding variable and change it
as you like. The default is "ascii". Sounds like your sys admin may have
changed it to "latin-1".

Nah, more likely is that he is using 2.3 which uses
locale.nl_langinfo(CODESET) to find out which encoding to use on
output.

Cheers,
mwh

--
(ps: don't feed the lawyers: they just lose their fear of humans)
-- Peter Wood, comp.lang.lisp