With default encoding left as 'ascii', interactively
doing x=raw_input('say something funny: ') and 
entering a non-ascii character seems to work OK
in a textmode interactive interpreter (Linux 
Mandrake
8.1 and KDE Console, Win98) and on IDLE on Win98.  
On
IDLE with Linux Mandrake 8.1 and KDE, though:

Python 2.2 (#1, Dec 23 2001, 20:09:01) 
[GCC 2.96 20000731 (Mandrake Linux 8.1 
2.96-0.62mdk)] on linux2
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more 
information.
IDLE 0.8 -- press F1 for help
>>> palö
UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in 
range(128)
>>> x=raw_input('say something funny: ')
say something funny: palö
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#1>", line 1, in ?
    x=raw_input('say something funny: ')
TypeError: object.readline() returned non-string
>>> 

This came up on python-help (not sure what platform 
the querant was using), I originally didn't think of
it as a bug and told the querant to change the 
default encoding in site.py, but Skip doubted that
was OK and asked on python-list, where Martin said:

"In IDLE, I'd say there is a bug somewhere. I'm not 
sure what ... If there is a bug, it is ok to work 
around it with any means you find.
It would be better to report it to SF, though."

so here it is, the SF bug report as requested.


Alex

Logged In: YES 
user_id=33168

This is fixed in IDLEfork.  Remind to close when idlefork is
merged.

Logged In: YES 
user_id=33168

Now that IDLEfork has been merged into 2.3, this should be
fixed.