Another programming-centric post and follow-up on Thursday's post about locale issues with Turkish.

So, I showed some Problems with locale-dependant mappings using the case of Turkish, that mapps small Latin character i to uppercase İ, which also has a dot on top. Now join me on some more magic. On Unix you need to have the proper locale generated, which under debian works with dpkg-reconfigure locales.

Dear lazyweb,

I am looking for examples of bad Pinyin where invalid diacritics are being used.

I have two already for the third tone, but I am curious if other tones also see similar errors.

1. Xiàndài Hànyû Dàcídiân (Circumflex)
2. Wŏ huì shuō yìdiănr (Breve)

I complained about Python doctest and Unicode some time ago. This was an itch I finally wanted to scratch, so I followed the popular saying: "Luke, read the source".

Turns out the error in question is fixed pretty easily. Python needs to properly encode the output, so a conversion to the output stream's encoding did the trick. Now a new issue came up.

¡ǝpoɔıun oʇ sʞuɐɥʇ uʍop ǝpısdn ǝʇıɹʍ uɐɔ noʎ 'ʇou ɹo ʇı ǝʌǝılǝq.

This is nothing new (see [1] or [2]), but I wrote a small Python program for this to pipe my instant messaging through it. Needless to say that with KDE's Kopete I found yet another application that seems not to work with non-ASCII characters.

Today I found out about Python's doctest module. "The doctest module searches for pieces of text that look like interactive Python sessions, and then executes those sessions to verify that they work exactly as shown."