to_clipboard() locks clipboard system-wide on exception

[klonuo]

Exception in the following code locks clipboard system-wide until I exit my interactive Python session:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame.from_dict({1: u' \u2014'}, 'index')
df.to_clipboard()
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
UnicodeEncodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-58-1f8b11f0ff98> in <module>()
----> 1 df.to_clipboard()

C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pandas\core\generic.pyc in to_clipboard(self, excel, sep, **kwargs)
   1000         from pandas.io import clipboard
-> 1001         clipboard.to_clipboard(self, excel=excel, sep=sep, **kwargs)
   1002 
   1003     #----------------------------------------------------------------------

C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\clipboard.pyc in to_clipboard(obj, excel, sep, **kwargs)
     95     else:
     96         objstr = str(obj)
---> 97     clipboard_set(objstr)

C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pandas\util\clipboard.pyc in winSetClipboard(text)
     63     try:
     64         # works on Python 2 (bytes() only takes one argument)
---> 65         hCd = ctypes.windll.kernel32.GlobalAlloc(GMEM_DDESHARE, len(bytes(text))+1)
     66     except TypeError:
     67         # works on Python 3 (bytes() requires an encoding)

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2014' in position 10: ordinal not in range(128)

pandas 0.14.1

[jreback]

where its failing is copied from pyperclip. (though its included in pandas under license). So it is possible to modify.

I suppose you can just do those windows locks in a with. Though I am not really familiar with how windows works in that regard.

[jreback]

closing as stale. pls reopen if still an issue.