"_wolf" <wolfgang.l...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:22991c72-d00f-45cd-9bf7-0b80fc431...@k26g2000vbp.googlegroups.com...
hi folks,i am doing my first steps in the wonderful world of python 3. some things are good. some things have to be relearned. some things drive me crazy. sadly, i'm working on a windows box. which, in germany, entails that python thinks it to be a good idea to take cp1252 as the default encoding. so just coz i got my box in germany means i can never print out a chinese character? say what? i have no troubles with people configuring their python installation to use any encoding in the world, but wouldn't it have been less of a surprise to just assume utf-8 for any file in/output? after all, it is already the default for python source files as far as i understand. someone might think they're clever to sniff into the system and make the somehwat educated guess that this dude's using cp1252 for his files. but they would be wrong. so: how can i tell python, in a configuration or using a setting in sitecustomize.py, or similar, to use utf-8 as a default encoding? there used to be a trick to say `reload(sys);sys.setdefaultencoding ('utf-8')`, but that has no effect in py3.0.1. also, i cannot set `sys.stdout.encoding`; is there a way to re-open that stream with a different encoding? in all, i believe it is quite unsettling to me to see that, on my py3 installation, sys.getdefaultencoding() == 'utf-8' sys.stdout.encoding == 'cp1252' locale.getlocale() == (None, None) locale.getdefaultlocale() == ('de_DE', 'cp1252') which to me makes as much sense as a blackcurrant tart thrown into space. worse, locale.setlocale( locale.LC_ALL, locale.getdefaultlocale() ) results in locale.Error: unsupported locale setting this bloody thing doesn't accept its *own* output. attempts to feed that locale beast with anything but the empty string or 'C' were all doomed. it would take a very patient and eloquent person to explain that in a credible fashion to me. my word for this is, 'broken'. i would very much like to rid myself of these considerations. just say it's all utf-8, wash'n'go. my attempts of changing python's mind using the locale module have failed so far. otherwise, i for one don't want to touch that locale thing with a very long pole. as far as i can see, it does not work as documented. the platform dependencies are also a clear OFF LIMITS sign to me. any suggestions?
What specifically do you want to do? I work with Chinese all the time on a U.S. Windows system. Do you want to print Chinese characters in a console window? In a Python IDE? FYI, I don't use the locale module for much at all.
I can't type or print Chinese to a console window unless I change Control Panel, Regional and Language Options, Advanced Tab, Language for non-Unicode Programs to a Chinese selection (and reboot). Then the default sys.stdout.encoding is something like cp936.
The Pythonwin IDE in the latest version of pywin32, however, supports UTF-8 in its interactive window and displays Chinese fine.
Setting PYTHONIOENCODING overrides the encoding used for stdin/stdout/stderr (See the Python help for details), but if your terminal doesn't support the encoding that won't help.
Let me know what you're trying to do. -Mark -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
