PDA display function crashes when rendering Unicode rightarrow #6
Description
Many students reported the PDA::display_state_diagram function crashing with the error:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2192' in position xxx: character maps to <undefined>
For context, the function is trying to write PDA transition labels of the form "a, b → c", where the → character is \u2192. Of course, the charmap coding doesn't understand unicode, which is causing the failure. We need utf-8 encoding instead. As a short term fix, students were able to successfully get around this by launching their interactive Python session with:
python -X utf8
What's a bit of a mystery to me is why this works for some students out of the box and not for others (I would expect consistent failures), but this might be related to our broader issue of not controlling an installation environment for the package. It's probably python version dependent or something.