WTF? Printing unicode strings

[Ron Garret]

In article <1148038129.231027.118010 at g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
 "Serge Orlov" <Serge.Orlov at gmail.com> wrote:

> Serge Orlov wrote:
> > Ron Garret wrote:
> > > In article <1148001708.183506.296240 at g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> > >  "Serge Orlov" <Serge.Orlov at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Ron Garret wrote:
> > > > > > > I'm using an OS X terminal to ssh to a Linux machine.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > In theory it should work out of the box. OS X terminal should set
> > > > > > enviromental variable LANG=en_US.utf-8, then ssh should transfer 
> > > > > > this
> > > > > > variable to Linux and python will know that your terminal is utf-8.
> > > > > > Unfortunately AFAIK OS X terminal doesn't set that variable and 
> > > > > > most
> > > > > > (all?) ssh clients don't transfer it between machines. As a 
> > > > > > workaround
> > > > > > you can set that variable on linux yourself . This should work in 
> > > > > > the
> > > > > > command line right away:
> > > > > >
> > > > > > LANG=en_US.utf-8 python -c "print unichr(0xbd)"
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Or put the following line in ~/.bashrc and logout/login
> > > > > >
> > > > > > export LANG=en_US.utf-8
> > > > >
> > > > > No joy.
> > > > >
> > > > > ron at www01:~$ LANG=en_US.utf-8 python -c "print unichr(0xbd)"
> > > > > Traceback (most recent call last):
> > > > >   File "<string>", line 1, in ?
> > > > > UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xbd' in
> > > > > position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
> > > > > ron at www01:~$
> > > >
> > > > What version of python and what shell do you run? What the following
> > > > commands print:
> > > >
> > > > python -V
> > > > echo $SHELL
> > > > $SHELL --version
> > >
> > > ron at www01:~$ python -V
> > > Python 2.3.4
> > > ron at www01:~$ echo $SHELL
> > > /bin/bash
> > > ron at www01:~$ $SHELL --version
> > > GNU bash, version 2.05b.0(1)-release (i386-pc-linux-gnu)
> > > Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> > > ron at www01:~$
> >
> > That's recent enough. I guess the distribution you're using set LC_*
> > variables for no good reason. Either unset all enviromental variables
> > starting with LC_ and set LANG variable or overide LC_CTYPE variable:
> >
> > LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf-8 python -c "print unichr(0xbd)"
> >
> > Should be working now :)
> 
> I've pulled myself together and installed linux in vwware player.
> Apparently there is another way linux distributors can screw up. I
> chose debian 3.1 minimal network install and after answering all
> installation questions I found that only ascii and latin-1 english
> locales were installed:
> $ locale -a
> C
> en_US
> en_US.iso88591
> POSIX
> 
> In 2006, I would expect utf-8 english locale to be present even in
> minimal install. I had to edit /etc/locale.gen and run locale-gen as
> root. After that python started to print unicode characters.

That's it.  Thanks!

rg