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If I select "UTF-8" then I see field value as "����" but if I select "System" then I see field value as empty string. Why I get different result if my system encoding is UTF-8?

dr - wrote:

If I select "UTF-8" then I see field value as "����" but if I select "System" then I see field value as empty string. Why I get different result if my system encoding is UTF-8?

Qt's detection (or iconv's) of the system encoding is tricky. With LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 the system codec is different from the UTF-8 codec.

#!/usr/bin/python

from PyQt4.QtCore import QTextCodec

sc = QTextCodec.codecForName( "System" )
lc = QTextCodec.codecForLocale()
uc = QTextCodec.codecForName( "utf-8" )
wc = QTextCodec.codecForName( "windows-1251" )

a = "\\313\\305\\321\\300" 
print "input:", a

b = sc.toUnicode(a)
print u"sc output: {} ({})".format(unicode(b), sc.name())

b = lc.toUnicode(a)
print u"lc output: {} ({})".format(unicode(b), lc.name())

b = uc.toUnicode(a)
print u"uc output: {} ({})".format(unicode(b), uc.name())

b = wc.toUnicode(a)
print u"wc output: {} ({})".format(unicode(b), wc.name())

produces

input: ����
sc output:  (System)
lc output:  (System)
uc output: ���� (UTF-8)
wc output: ЛЕСА (windows-1251)

But I don't see much difference between the empty string and the question mark junk. What's the point of not using the actual encoding of the data?

I see a lot of difference between empty string and questions marks! Questions marks are strongly associated with 'something is wrong', empty strings on the other side are common in the data and 'look' correct.