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You are mixing things here:
The source encoding is meant for the parser and defines the way Unicode literals are converted into Unicode objects.
The encoding used on the stdout stream doesn't have anything to do with the source code encoding and has to be handled differently.
Sorry. I probably wasn't clear enough in my message. I understand the issue, and I'm not discussing source encoding at all. The only problem I'd like to solve is that of output streams not being able to have unicode strings written.
The idiom presented by Bob is the right way to go: wrap sys.stdout with a StreamEncoder.
I don't see that as a good solution, since every Python software that is internationalizaed will have do figure out this wrapping, introducing extra overhead unnecessarily.
Using sys.setdefaultencoding() is *not* the right solution to the problem.
I understand.
In general when writing programs that are targetted for i18n, you should use Unicode for all text data and convert from Unicode to 8-bit only at the IO/UI layer.
That's what I think as well. I just would expect that Python was kind enough to allow me to tell which output encoding I want, instead of wrapping the sys.stdout object with a non-native-file. IOW, being widely necessary, handling internationalization without wrapping sys.stdout everytime seems like a good step for a language like Python.
The various wrappers in the codecs module make this rather easy.
Thanks for the suggestion! -- Gustavo Niemeyer http://niemeyer.net