WTF? Printing unicode strings

[Serge Orlov]

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 :)