[Python-Dev] Proposal: new environment variable PYTHONSTDOUTENCODING

[M.-A. Lemburg]

On 2008-05-20 10:22, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> I'd like to propose a new environment variable PYTHONSTDOUTENCODING.
> This is meant to solve various problems that people had with Python
> not detecting their terminal encoding correctly; it would override
> any detection that Python would use for determining the encoding of
> stdout (and stdin - but that's less relevant in 2.x).

How is this relevant for 2.x ?

In 2.x, stdin and stdout are just files without any io wrappers
around them.

Writing Unicode to stdout will still use the default encoding
ASCII to convert it to an 8-bit string. All other 8-bit strings
will be passed to stdout as-is.

For 3.x, I'd like to see a PYTHONSTDINENCODING, because the current
way of relying on the terminal encoding does work well... it then
falls back to ASCII, which prevents entering e.g. German Umlauts.

> In particular, setting this environment variable would also disable
> the detection of whether stdout is a terminal. This is desirable
> for cases as the pydev eclipse plugin, where Python currently
> fails to detect that the output is a terminal (and technically,
> what Eclipse provides is not a terminal, but just a pipe, as you
> can't do pseudoterms in Java).
> 
> This would have the additional effect that the encoding also gets
> in effect when redirecting stdout to a file. Whether or not this
> is a good thing might be debatable; giving the user the control over
> it (to set or clear that variable) is a good thing, IMO.
> 
> Naming contest: it probably would be the longest of the PYTHON*
> variables. I would not want to call it PYTHONENCODING, or
> PYTHONSTDENCODING, though, because people might infer that it
> affects sys.getdefaultencoding(), which it shouldn't.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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