…or I might just stop loving you.

So following on from Tollef’s recent pyblosxom-related posting I thought that the discovery I made about how to fix unicode comments deserved to be blogged for the world to see.

Scott James Remnant pointed out to me on IRC that there exists a problem with people who post comments in utf-8. The issue it seems is that the comments plugin assumes uploaded comments are in iso-8859–1 which sucks a little. Line 200 of the standard comments.py is about the right place for a fix; and here’s mine. Remember I’m not a good python coder…:

Replace: cfile.write(’<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“iso-8859–1”?>\n’)

With:

        try:

            comment[‘description’].decode(‘utf-8’)

            cfile.write(’<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“utf-8”?>\n’)

        except:

            cfile.write(’<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“iso-8859–1”?>\n’)