Comment 4 for bug 880267

I solved this bug. I do not know if my workaround create other issues, but it works properly so far.

The problem is about the way 'ord()' deals with special characters in the final 'while' of
/usr/lib/gedit/plugins/joinlines.py

It seems to be a known issue in python.
You can try it out in python:
>>> char='è'
>>> ord(char)
fails, while
>>> char=u'è'
>>> ord(char)
works.

I did not managed to rewrite a working definition of 'char' in joinlines.py, but I believe that the call 'ord(char)' is only a test for 'while' to check is a character is found. Therefore, if a "string of length" >1 is given as 'char', in this case, it does not matter what character is, but only that 'char' contains a character.

As a newby of python, I solved this bug for the split/join-lines plugin replacing the two calls 'while ord(char)' with
'while ord(char[:1])' in the final lines of the file /usr/lib/gedit/plugins/joinlines.py,
it works!