[Zope3-Users] Problem with zope.i18n.locales, currency formatting, and encodings

[Doyon, Jean-Francois]

Hello,

I'm using the Zope 3 in Zope 2.10 ... (So Zope 3.3 I think?).

I'm trying to use the locales package to format currency (and other numbers) into locale sensitive strings.

I've figured out the API:

>>> from zope.i18n.locales import locales
>>> locale = locales.getLocale('en', 'CA')
>>> formatter = locale.numbers.getFormatter('currency')
>>> formatter.format(29.95)
u'\xa429.95'
>>> locale.numbers.currencies['CAD'].symbol
u'$'

The problem is that bizarre encoding: \xa4 ... The dollar sign being standard 7-bit ascii, I'm not sure why it gets encoded this way ... And the symbol definition itself IS correct!

In my ZPT that symbol looks like something of a star with a circle in the middle ... Nothing anywhere near a dollar sign :)

I've tried some decode/encode options, but to no avail:

>>> cs.decode()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa4' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> cs.encode('latin1')
'\xa429.95'
>>> cs.encode('utf-8')
'\xc2\xa429.95'
>>> cs.encode('utf-8').decode()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

What am I missing here?

Thanks,

Jean-François Doyon
Internet Service Development and Systems Support / Spécialiste de dèveloppements internet et soutien technique
Canada Centre for Remote Sensing/Centre Canadien de télédétection
Natural Resources Canada/Ressources Naturelles Canada
http://atlas.gc.ca
Tel./Tél.: (613) 992-4902
Fax: (613) 947-2410