[Python] Windows XP unicode and escape sequences

You've got two problems. First, you don't need to encode it; if the
command prompt window displayed your output after encoding it would
display the multi-byte form of your characters. You should just send
it a unicode object.

Second, check the .encoding attribute of the sys.stdout object.
Therein lies enlightenment about what the command prompt window will
accept.

No info on your other problem.

John Roth

wrote:
It's not the font. (OK, it's partially the font.) To display Greek
characters to the console, your console session has to be set for a code
page that includes Greek characters.
CONFIG.NT only affects 16-bit programs running in the NTVDM (the Virtual
DOS Machine).

32-bit console apps (which Python is) simply cannot use ANSI escape
sequences. You have to use the Win32 APIs to do color. There are
curses-like libraries available for Python. Or:

http://www.effbot.org/zone/console-handbook.htm

Thank you John and Tim.

With your help I found that the XP console code page is set up for 'cp437' and with a little bit of browsing I found that 869 is the code page for Modern Greek. After changing it to 869 that did the trick! Thanks very much for this advice.

This brings up another question. If I run some Python code that starts off with 'os.system('cp869')' so it will change to the correct code page, then when it starts printing the Greek characters it breaks. But run the same Python code again and it works fine. Is there another way to do this so I can change over to the 869 code page and continue on with the Greek letters printing correctly?

Thanks Tim for the info about the CONFIG.NT file as well as the curses-like info. I'll continue to research these.

Thanks again!

Jay

From nejtak... Mon Dec 17 00:28:02 2007
From: nejtak... (Troels Thomsen)
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:28:02 +0100
Subject: int vs long
Message-ID: <4765b49d$0$15883$[email protected]>


The readFile function from the win32 package aparently really expect an
integer :

def inWaiting(self):
"""Returns the number of bytes waiting to be read"""
flags, comstat = ClearCommError(self.__handle)
return comstat.cbInQue

ReadFile(h, s.inWaiting())

My code crashes because inWaiting returns a long, not an int

Why is that different on my machine and my collegues ? Have I or he
installed a wrong version of a package?
CPython 2.5.

Was not expecting int<->long type problems in excactly python language.
Is that because we are navigating so close to the win32 api that the types
are more strictly enforced ?

Thx in advance
Troels

Try using the unicode switch ( cmd.exe /u ), rather than trying to set
the codepage. See here:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/cmd.mspx?mfr=true

Regards,
Jordan

wrote:
That's probably because the encoding of stdin, stdout, and stderr is set
according to the code page of the console they're connected to (if any)
when Python starts.
Unfortunately, you can't easily change the encoding of file object after
it's been created. It's probably simpler convert Unicode strings to cp869
before printing them instead of having Python do it automatically for you.

Ross Ridge

You'll have to call SetConsoleOutputCP (see MSDN). Python does not
directly expose that, so you'll have to use ctypes or PythonWin to
call it.

Regards,
Martin