[PyQt] QApplication constructor mangles non-ascii characters in unicode strings

[Pavel Roskin]

Hello!

I'm porting a PyQt based application to Python 3. If I initialize
QApplication with sys.argv, QApplication.arguments() returns those
arguments with non-ascii characters stripped out in PyQt4 or replaced
with "replacement character" in PyQt5. The end result is that files
with non-ascii (but valid UTF-8) names cannot be opened. A workaround
that I don't quite like is to encode the arguments and pass them as
bytes.

I made this simple test case to show the problem. The test case runs
in both Python 2 and Python 3. Comment out the other import to use
PyQt4 instead of PyQt5.

#! /usr/bin/python
#from PyQt4.QtGui import QApplication
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication
args = [u"test", u"tsch\u00fcss", u"tsch\u00fcss".encode("utf-8")]
print("args:", args)
qapp = QApplication(args)
qargs = qapp.arguments()
for qarg in qargs:
    print("qarg:", qarg)

Output under Python 2 and PyQt5

('args:', [u'test', u'tsch\xfcss', 'tsch\xc3\xbcss'])
('qarg:', u'test')
('qarg:', u'tsch\ufffdss')
('qarg:', u'tsch\xfcss')

\ufffd is a the unicode replacement character. It cannot be traced
back to u umlaut. \xfc is u umlaut. So the unicode argument got
mangled, whereas the encoded argument was decoded back to correct
unicode.

I just want to pass sys.argv to the QApplication constructor without
any extra manipulations, with any Python version.

I'm using Ubuntu 14.10 with the following packages:

python-qt4 4.11.2+dfsg-1
python-pyqt5 5.3.2+dfsg-1ubuntu1
python3-pyqt4 4.11.2+dfsg-1
python3-pyqt5 5.3.2+dfsg-1ubuntu1
python 2.7.8-1
python3 3.4.2-1

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin