pipeline encoding

[Peter Otten]

Tomek Toczyski wrote:

> Diez B. Roggisch:
> 
>>
>> Python tries and guesses the stdout-encoding based on the terminal 
>> settings. So the first print works.
>>
>> However, piping to a file means that it can't do so, because it doesn't 
>> (and shouldn't) make any assumptions on the output encoding desired - 
>> after all, it might be appending to a XML-file with e.g. latin1 
>> encoding.
>>
>> So you need to explictely encode the unicode-object with the desired 
>> encoding:
>>
>>
>> python -c "print u'\u03A9'.encode('utf-8')" > file.txt
> 
> Thanks. It is a solutiona to my problem but:
> 
> Are there any command line option for telling python what encoding to use 
> for stdout?
> 
> To be honest I have a more complicated program than the example that I 
> have presented - there are many print commands inside and it is not very 
> feasible for me to put .encode('utf-8') inside every print occurence.

Alternatively you can wrap stdout:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys

if sys.stdout.encoding is None:
    import locale
    import codecs

    encoding = locale.getpreferredencoding() # or just "utf-8"
    streamwriter = codecs.lookup(encoding).streamwriter
    sys.stdout = streamwriter(sys.stdout)

print u"ähnlich üblich möglich"