If I type a unicode string, such as u"éÜÕÝ" in the
interactive interpreter in the terminal, it does what I
expect - return the unicode string (in this case,
u'\u05e9\u05dc\u05d5\u05dd')

However, if I type it in IDLE's interactive
interpreter, I get something funny - I get a unicode
string (u'\xd7\xa9\xd7\x9c\xd7\x95\xd7\x9d'), which is
actually u"éÜÕÝ".decode('utf8').encode('latin1').

This is caused by the PyShell.runsource method, which
checks if the source string it gets is unicode, and if
so, encodes it using the 'ascii' codec. If this check
is removed, so that the unicode object itself gets
compiled, everything works out fine.

The bottom line: remove the if block starting with "if
isinstance(source, types.UnicodeType)", at
PyShell.py:589, and everything is fine.

Have a good day,
Noam

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This isn't right, though: it will assume that the source is
UTF-8 encoded, even though the user would expect a different
encoding.

The "right" way would be if IDLE compiled the source with
IOBindings.encoding.

Rejecting this patch.

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But IOBindings.encoding is a hard coded 'latin1', which is 
certainly not better than 'utf8'.

Is there a way to detect the encoding from the current locale?

Noam

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No, IOBindings.encoding is not hard coded 'latin1'. It is
locale.getdefaultlocale()[1] on Windows, and
locale.nl_langinfo(locale.CODESET) on Unix. If these fail,
it is 'ascii'.