Python, Unicode, and the Windows console

Note: This answer is sort of outdated (from 2008). Please use the solution below with care!!

Here is a page that details the problem and a solution (search the page for the text Wrapping sys.stdout into an instance):

PrintFails - Python Wiki

Here's a code excerpt from that page:

$ python -c 'import sys, codecs, locale; print sys.stdout.encoding; \
    sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter(locale.getpreferredencoding())(sys.stdout); \
    line = u"\u0411\n"; print type(line), len(line); \
    sys.stdout.write(line); print line'
  UTF-8
  <type 'unicode'> 2
  Б
  Б

  $ python -c 'import sys, codecs, locale; print sys.stdout.encoding; \
    sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter(locale.getpreferredencoding())(sys.stdout); \
    line = u"\u0411\n"; print type(line), len(line); \
    sys.stdout.write(line); print line' | cat
  None
  <type 'unicode'> 2
  Б
  Б

There's some more information on that page, well worth a read.

Despite the other plausible-sounding answers that suggest changing the code page to 65001, that does not work. (Also, changing the default encoding using sys.setdefaultencoding is not a good idea.)

See this question for details and code that does work.

The below code will make Python output to console as UTF-8 even on Windows.

The console will display the characters well on Windows 7 but on Windows XP it will not display them well, but at least it will work and most important you will have a consistent output from your script on all platforms. You'll be able to redirect the output to a file.

Below code was tested with Python 2.6 on Windows.

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-

import codecs, sys

reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

print sys.getdefaultencoding()

if sys.platform == 'win32':
    try:
        import win32console 
    except:
        print "Python Win32 Extensions module is required.\n You can download it from https://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/ (x86 and x64 builds are available)\n"
        exit(-1)
    # win32console implementation  of SetConsoleCP does not return a value
    # CP_UTF8 = 65001
    win32console.SetConsoleCP(65001)
    if (win32console.GetConsoleCP() != 65001):
        raise Exception ("Cannot set console codepage to 65001 (UTF-8)")
    win32console.SetConsoleOutputCP(65001)
    if (win32console.GetConsoleOutputCP() != 65001):
        raise Exception ("Cannot set console output codepage to 65001 (UTF-8)")

#import sys, codecs
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf8')(sys.stdout)
sys.stderr = codecs.getwriter('utf8')(sys.stderr)

print "This is an Е乂αmp١ȅ testing Unicode support using Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and CJK code points.\n"

Just enter this code in command line before executing python script:

chcp 65001 & set PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8

The cause of your problem is NOT the Win console not willing to accept Unicode (as it does this since I guess Win2k by default). It is the default system encoding. Try this code and see what it gives you:

import sys
sys.getdefaultencoding()

if it says ascii, there's your cause ;-) You have to create a file called sitecustomize.py and put it under python path (I put it under /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages, but that is differen on Win - it is c:\python\lib\site-packages or something), with the following contents:

import sys
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

and perhaps you might want to specify the encoding in your files as well:

# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
import sys,time

Edit: more info can be found in excellent the Dive into Python book

TL;DR:

print(yourstring.encode('ascii','replace'));

I ran into this myself, working on a Twitch chat (IRC) bot. (Python 2.7 latest)

I wanted to parse chat messages in order to respond...

msg = s.recv(1024).decode("utf-8")

but also print them safely to the console in a human-readable format:

print(msg.encode('ascii','replace'));

This corrected the issue of the bot throwing UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' errors and replaced the unicode characters with ?.

The issue is with windows default encoding being set to cp1252, and need to be set to utf-8. (check PEP)

Check default encoding using:

import locale 
locale.getpreferredencoding()

You can override locale settings

import os
if os.name == "nt":
    import _locale
    _locale._gdl_bak = _locale._getdefaultlocale
    _locale._getdefaultlocale = (lambda *args: (_locale._gdl_bak()[0], 'utf8'))

referenced code from stack link