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Can you provide an example of raising a unicode error like this:

u = makeUnicodeString() # your choice of function int(u)

In Python 2.3, I get this:

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int(u"\u1234") Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in ? UnicodeEncodeError: 'decimal' codec can't encode character '\u1234' in position 0: invalid decimal Unicode string

In Python 2.2, this raises ValueError.

I spoke too soon. UnicodeEncodeError is a subclass of ValueError. So catching ValueError from int(str_or_unicode) is the way to go. Who's writing that Zope 3 style guide again? --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)