[PySide] trouble with special characters in widget.setToolTip()

[Frank Rueter | OHUfx]

Hi guys,

I've been reading up on unicode and character encoding a bit today and 
just when I thought I had a vague idea how it all works I ran into this 
problem:

I am retrieving unicode from a website, which I need to format a little, 
then display as a widget's tooltip.
When I print out my formatted string I get the special characters I 
expect, but when I use the same string as a tooltip, it displays a "å" 
character instead.
Here is a screen shot of what I'm seeing:


And below is a simple test that shows my problem.
Can somebody please explain to me what is going on here and how I should 
be handle this properly?

Cheers,
frank

    import sys
    from PySide import QtGui

    quotationMark = u'\u201c'
    myText = 'special charactes cause headaches:
    {}'.format(quotationMark.encode('utf-8'))
    print myText # this prints the crrect special character (quotation mark)

    app = QtGui.QApplication([])
    w = QtGui.QWidget()
    w.setToolTip(myText) # this just ends up displaying a "å" character
    w.show()
    w.raise_()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())


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