print u"\u0432": why is this so hard? UnciodeEncodeError

[David Eppstein]

In article <8gbrlvz1k1.fsf at galapagos.bx.psu.edu>,
 Scott Schwartz <"schwartz+ at usenet "@bio.cse.psu.edu> wrote:

> > It is: however, your locale only tells Python the encoding of your
> > terminal, not the encoding of an arbitrary file you may write to.
> 
> That's not the usual interpretation of locale.  It's not about
> terminals, it's about everything, especially files.

Files should be in a format that specifies the encoding explicitly, 
either within the file or as part of an external file format 
specification.  One should not have to hope that the locale of the 
person using the file is the same as that of the person who created it.

(I realize locale also affects e.g. collation order, but the most 
problems come from encoding mismatches.)

-- 
David Eppstein                      http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science