Sorry I didn't chime in sooner, as I'm pretty sure i know exactly what the problem is, and I should have reported it a couple weeks ago when I found it.
Matplotlib aside, you might want to make sure you installed the
Unicode version of wxWidgets, and reinstall it if necessary.
Actually, this is backwards -- I think the OP is using the unicode version of wxPython, and that's the source of the problem. The unicode version returns a unicode object from a FileDialog for a path. MPL can't deal with a unicode filename, and thus the error:
Matplotlib backend_wx error
cannot return std::string from Unicode object
There are a couple solutions:
1) use the ansi, rather than unicode version of wxPython.
2) Patch MPL:
a) convert the filename to a string before passing it off to MPL -- this is an bad kludge, as the Mac (and recent Windows, and Linux, and...) filesystem is unicode, and folks could have non-ansi characters in their filenames.
b) Open the file with Python, and pass that into the MPL savefig method, instead of the filename. This is apparently slow with older MPLs, but has been fixed for good performance in SVN.
However, I think I tried this on the Mac, and it worked great, but on Windows, I didn't get errors, but didn't get valid PNGs either. I ended up going back to converting my filename to a string and passing that off to MPL.
See:
http://www.nabble.com/unicode-filenames-and-MPL.-to16318069.html#a16318069
For more discussion.
Can an MPL dev fix this, please?
-Chris
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