GeezerVison

The character-cell window methods now accept a full character cell -- a spacing character optionally followed by combining characters (up to CCHARW_MAX wide characters) -- in addition to a single int or byte character. This affects addch(), bkgd(), bkgdset(), border(), box(), echochar(), hline(), insch() and vline(), which dispatch to the ncursesw wide-character functions (wadd_wch(), wbkgrnd(), wborder_set(), wecho_wchar(), whline_set(), wins_wch(), wvline_set(), ...) when given a string. border() and box() cannot mix integer or byte characters with wide-string characters in a single call.

A cell is one spacing character optionally followed by combining characters, so an extra spacing or control character (for example "ab", an emoji ZWJ sequence, or an emoji with a skin-tone modifier) is rejected with ValueError rather than being silently truncated by setcchar(). A single control character is still accepted (curses applies its usual control processing, e.g. backspace, tab and carriage return).

Also added are the wide-character read methods window.get_wstr() and window.in_wstr(), the counterparts of window.getstr() and window.instr() that return a str rather than bytes, and the module functions curses.erasewchar(), curses.killwchar() and curses.wunctrl(), the wide-character counterparts of curses.erasechar(), curses.killchar() and curses.unctrl().

All of this is available only when built against the wide-character ncursesw library.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

• Issue: Add wide-character (cchar_t) support to the curses module #151757