I would like to be able to do this:
something.set_markup(_("<b>Total: %s</b>") % gobject.markup_escape_text(mydata))

at least data types 'str' and 'unicode' should be handled correctly.
preferably any data convertable to string should be accepted, that is anything that defines __str__().

gobject.markup_escape_text() should allow type 'unicode' input and return same type as input. If unicode string is escaped, it should first be encoded to utf-8, ran through g_markup_escape and decoded back to unicode string. Alternatively a pure python replacement can be made.

g_markup_escape() expects utf-8 string, gobject.markup_escape_text() accepts both str() and unicode(), however does not handle unicode type correctly.

Other information:
# test case:
>>> gobject.markup_escape_text(u"\u20ac")
Traceback (most recent call last):

+ Trace 124895