pipeline encoding

[Rob Wolfe]

Tomasz Toczyski <tt at praterm.com.pl> writes:

> My locale is set to UTF-8. The command:
> python -c "print u'\u03A9'"
> gives me the desired result and doesn't produce any error.
>
> But when I want to redirect the output to a file I invoke:
> python -c "print u'\u03A9'" > file.txt
> I get an error:
>
> File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u03a9' in
> position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
>
> How to cope with it?

If you print to a terminal Python can use terminal encoding,
but if you redirect to a file Python doesn't know
what encoding to use (e.g. how was encoded existing file) 
and refuses to guess.
You have to specify that encoding explicit:
python -c "print u'\u03A9'.encode('utf-8')" > file.txt

HTH,
Rob