Character encoding & the copyright symbol

[Nobody]

On Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:14:08 -0700, Robert Dailey wrote:

> I'm loading a file via open() in Python 3.1 and I'm getting the
> following error when I try to print the contents of the file that I
> obtained through a call to read():
> 
> UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\xa9' in
> position 1650: character maps to <undefined>
> 
> The file is defined as ASCII and the copyright symbol shows up just
> fine in Notepad++. However, Python will not print this symbol. How can
> I get this to work? And no, I won't replace it with "(c)". Thanks!

1. As others have said, your file *isn't* ASCII, but that isn't the
problem.

2. The problem is that the encoding which your standard output
stream uses doesn't have the copyright symbol. You need to use something
like:

sys.stdout = io.TextIOWrapper(sys.stdout.detach(), encoding = 'iso-8859-1')
sys.stderr = io.TextIOWrapper(sys.stderr.detach(), encoding = 'iso-8859-1')

to fix the encoding of the stdout and stderr streams.