Encoding confusion, please help

[Pekka Niiranen]

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

> Pekka Niiranen wrote:
> 
>>  >>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
>> 'iso-8859-1'
> 
> 
> This is already troublesome; it means somebody (perhaps you)
> has tampered with your Python installation. The default system
> encoding is ascii, and it should not be changed unless
> absolutely necessary.

I do not recall changing it manually so just in case I reinstalled
latest versions of my default set of python tools in this order:

Python-2.3.4.exe
pywin32-203.win32-py2.3.exe
wxPython2.5-win32-unicode-2.5.3.1-py23.exe
ctypes-0.9.2.win32-py2.3.exe
numarray-1.1.win32-py2.3.exe
pychecker-0.8.14

and now it IS "ascii".

> 
>> When should I use locale.getpreferredencoding() and when
>> sys.getdefaultencoding()?
> 
> 
> There should never be a need to probe sys.getdefaultencoding(),
> as it should always be ascii.
> 
> locale.getpreferredencoding() should be used when converting
> Unicode strings to and from byte strings to be stored on the local
> system (e.g. in files). Notice that this may or may not be adequate
> also when printing data to the terminal. Specifically, on Windows,
> the terminal often uses yet another encoding.

Can I find out the terminal encoding somehow?

> 
>> Why two different encodings 'cp1252' and 'iso-8859-1' are provided
>> for my Windows 2000 system?
> 
> 
> Python provides many more encodings, including UTF-8, KOI-8R,
> ISO-8859-2, cp1250, and so on. Having many codecs available in
> the library is a good thing, because different applications have
> different needs.
> 
> I somehow feel this doesn't answer your question, but then, I don't
> fully understand the question.

The reason I asked was that since my Window's regional settings
matches "cp1252" I was puzzled by sys.getdefaultencoding()
not being the same.

> Regards,
> Martin