Encoding problems

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Gandalf wrote:
> This is a fault of the win32 console - it defaults to a different 
> encoding than other parts of the Windows system.
> This is messy but we cannot do anything about it. :-(

It's better than you think. Python, starting with 2.3, will do the
right thing for

# -*- coding: cp1252 -*-
print u"néz"

It determines that this is a Windows console, determines its encoding,
and converts the Unicode string to that encoding. Of course, this
requires the string to be a Unicode literal. So you'ld expect that

bildschirm = raw_input(u"néz")

works, but unfortunately, it doesn't, as raw_input does not support
Unicode. However, the encoding Python has determined is available
as sys.stdout.encoding, so you can do

bildschirm = raw_input(u"néz".encode(sys.stdout.encoding))

This works even if the user has done chcp in the window, as Python
queries the window what its encoding is, during Python startup.

HTH,
Martin