[Python-Dev] sys.stdout.write encoding failure

[Alexander Belopolsky]

There is currently a unit test in the trunk that fails in verbose mode:

$ ./python.exe Lib/test/test_doctest.py -v
...
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position
338-339: ordinal not in range(128)

Apparently, the problem is that stdout cannot encode non-ascii characters:

>>> sys.stdout.write(u'f\xf6\xf6')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position
1-2: ordinal not in range(128)

which is strange because

>>> sys.stdout.encoding
'UTF-8'

and print has no problem with the same string:
>>> print u'f\xf6\xf6'
föö


Where does  'ascii' codec come from?