pipeline encoding

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:13:04 -0300, Tomasz Toczyski <tt at praterm.com.pl>  
escribió:

> My locale is set to UTF-8. The command:
> python -c "print u'\u03A9'"
> gives me the desired result and doesn't produce any error.

Because in this case stdout is bound to your terminal and Python can ask  
the OS which encoding it uses.

> But when I want to redirect the output to a file I invoke:
> python -c "print u'\u03A9'" > file.txt
> I get an error:
>
> File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
> UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u03a9' in
> position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

In this case, stdout is redirected, and a file can be written in any  
encoding you like. So unless you tell Python which encoding to use, it  
refuses to guess. Try:

python -c "print u'\u03A9'.encode('utf-8')" > file.txt

Also try: python -c "import sys; print sys.stdout.encoding"
and see what happens in both cases.

-- 
Gabriel Genellina