UnicodeDecodeError when accessing missing dictionary item

[blackhex@…]

Accessing dictionary items with key containing non-ASCII characters fails with UnicodeDecodeError? exception when that item is not present in the dictionary.

For example:

MarkupTemplate(u"<p>${foo['öäü']}</p>").generate(foo={u'öäü': 42}).render('xhtml')

goes well, but

MarkupTemplate(u"<p>${foo['ö']}</p>").generate(foo={u'öäü': 42}).render('xhtml')

throws exception.

[Carsten Klein <carsten.klein@…>]

I do not think that this is a bug in genshi.

See ​http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t598507-getattr-setattr-still-ascii-only-not-unicode-blows-up-sgmllibfrom-beautifulsoup.html

for more information.

Excerpt:

Identifiers are restricted -- see section 2.3 (Identifiers and
keywords
) of the Reference Manual. The restriction is in effect that
they match r'[A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9_]*\Z'. Hence if you can't use
obj.nonASCIIname in your code, it makes sense for the equivalent usage
in setattr and getattr not to be available.

The same holds true for keys in a dict.

[Carsten Klein <carsten.klein@…>]

I think that the first example which is working is a nice side effect and nothing that should be counted on. Please use ascii only identifiers for keys.