Re: Decoding bytes to text strings in Python 2

On Sat, 22 Jun 2024 at 03:28, Rayner Lucas via Python-list
<python-list@python.org> wrote:

I'm curious about something I've encountered while updating a very old
Tk app (originally written in Python 1, but I've ported it to Python 2
as a first step towards getting it running on modern systems).
>
I am using Python 2.7.18 on a Windows 10 system. If there's any other
relevant information I should provide please let me know.

Unfortunately, you're running into one of the most annoying problems
from Python 2 and Windows: "narrow builds". You don't actually have
proper Unicode support. You have a broken implementation that works
for UCS-2 but doesn't actually support astral characters.

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.

ChrisA