WTF? Printing unicode strings

[Robert Kern]

Ron Garret wrote:

> I forgot to mention:
> 
>>>>sys.getdefaultencoding()
> 
> 'utf-8'

A) You shouldn't be able to do that.
B) Don't do that.
C) It's not relevant to the encoding of stdout which determines how unicode
strings get converted to bytes when printing them:

>>> import sys
>>> sys.stdout.encoding
'UTF-8'
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'
>>> print u'\xbd'
½

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
 that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
 an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco