the official way of printing unicode strings

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> My main problem is that when I use some language I want to use it the way it
> is supposed to be used. Usually doing like that saves many problems.
> Especially in Python, where there is one official way to do any elementary
> task. And I just want to know what is the normal, official way of printing
> unicode strings. I mean, the question is not "how can I print the unicode
> string" but "how the creators of the language suppose me to print the
> unicode string". I couldn't find an answer to this question in docs, so I
> hope somebody here knows it.
> 
> So, is it _the_ python way of printing unicode?

The official way to write Unicode strings into a file is not to do that.
Explicit is better then implicit - always explicitly pick an encoding,
and encode the Unicode string to that encoding. Doing so is possible in
any of the forms that you have shown.

Now, Python does not mandate any choice of encoding. The right way to
encode data is in the encoding that readers of your data expect it in.

For printing to the terminal, it is clear what the encoding needs to
be (namely, the one that is used by the terminal), hence Python choses
that one when printing to the terminal. When printing to the file, the
application needs to make a choice.

If you have no idea what encoding to use, your best choice is the one
returned by locale.getpreferredencoding(). This is the encoding that
the user is most likely to expect.

Regards,
Martin