I have been studying your reply for many hours now, trying to figure it all out. I am novice in many respects; eg. I did not know neither Locale, the command locale, nl_langinfo(), hexdump, that ctrl+d is EOF, etc. :-)
However I have found a way that solves my original problem, and I will post solutions/explanations to this thread within this week, as soon as I feel that the concepts have fallen into place in my head. Thanks, velle -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
