Unicode conversion in 'print'

[Serge Orlov]

Ricardo Bugalho wrote:
> Hello,
>  I'm using Python 2.3.4 and I noticed that, when stdout is a
terminal,
> the 'print' statement converts Unicode strings into the encoding
> defined by the locales instead of the one returned by
> sys.getdefaultencoding().

Sure. It uses the encoding of you console. Here is explanation why it
uses locale to get the encoding of console:
http://www.python.org/moin/PrintFails

> However, I can't find any references to it. Anyone knows where it's
> descrbed?

I've just wrote about it here:
http://www.python.org/moin/DefaultEncoding

>
> Example:
>
> !/usr/bin/env python
> # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
>
> import sys, locale
>
> print 'Python encoding:', sys.getdefaultencoding()
> print 'System encoding:', locale.getpreferredencoding()
> print 'Test string: ', u'Olá mundo'
>
>
> If stdout is a terminal, works fine
> $ python x.py
> Python encoding: ascii
> System encoding: UTF-8
> Test string:  Olá mundo
>
> If I redirect the output to a file, raises an UnicodeEncodeError
exception
> $ python x.py > x.txt
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "x.py", line 8, in ?
>     print 'Test string: ', u'Olá mundo'
> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in
position 2: ordinal not in range(128)
>

http://www.python.org/moin/ShellRedirectionFails

Feel free to reply here if something is not clear, corrections in wiki
are also welcome.

  Serge.