WTF? Printing unicode strings

[Ron Garret]

In article <mailman.5917.1147995329.27775.python-list at python.org>,
 Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ron Garret wrote:
> 
> > I'm using an OS X terminal to ssh to a Linux machine.
> 
> Click on the "Terminal" menu, then "Window Settings...". Choose "Display" 
> from
> the combobox. At the bottom you will see a combobox title "Character Set
> Encoding". Choose "Unicode (UTF-8)".

It was already set to UTF-8.

> > But what about this:
> > 
> >>>>f2=open('foo','w')
> >>>>f2.write(u'\xFF')
> > 
> > Traceback (most recent call last):
> >   File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> > UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xff' in 
> > position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
> > 
> > That should have nothing to do with my terminal, right?
> 
> Correct, that is a different problem. f.write() expects a string of bytes, 
> not a
> unicode string. In order to convert unicode strings to byte strings without 
> an
> explicit .encode() method call, Python uses the default encoding which is
> 'ascii'. It's not easily changeable for a good reason. Your modules won't 
> work
> on anyone else's machine if you hack that setting.

OK.

> > I just found http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/unicode, which seems to be 
> > enlightening.  The answer seems to be something like:
> > 
> > import codecs
> > f = codecs.open('foo','w','utf-8')
> > 
> > but that seems pretty awkward.
> 
> <shrug> About as clean as it gets when dealing with text encodings.

OK.  Thanks.

rg