"Gabriel Genellina" <gagsl-...@yahoo.com.ar> writes: > DON'T do that. Really. Changing the default encoding is a horrible, > horrible hack and causes a lot of problems. > ... > More reasons: > http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/2008/01/08/syssetdefaultencoding-is-evil/ > See also this recent thread in python-dev: > http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.devel/106134
This is a problem that appears quite often, against which I have yet to see a general workaround, or even a "safe pattern". I must confess that most often I just give up and change the "if 0:" line in sitecustomize.py to enable a reasonable default... A week ago I met another incarnation of the problem that I finally solved by reloading the sys module, a very ugly way, don't tell me, and I really would like to know a better way of doing it. The case is simple enough: a unit test started failing miserably, with a really strange traceback, and a quick pdb session revealed that the culprit was nosetest, when it prints out the name of the test, using some variant of "print testfunc.__doc__": since the latter happened to be a unicode string containing some accented letters, that piece of nosetest's code raised an encoding error, that went untrapped... I tried to understand the issue, until I found that I was inside a fresh new virtualenv with python 2.6 and the sitecustomize wasn't even there. So, even if my shell environ was UTF-8 (the system being a Ubuntu Jaunty), within that virtualenv Python's stdout encoding was 'ascii'. Rightly so, nosetest failed to encode the accented letters to that. I could just rephrase the test __doc__, or remove it, but to avoid future noise I decided to go with the deprecated "reload(sys)" trick, done as early as possible... damn, it's just a test suite after all! Is there a "correct" way of dealing with this? What should nosetest eventually do to initialize it's sys.output.encoding reflecting the system's settings? And on the user side, how could I otherwise fix it (I mean, without resorting to the reload())? Thank you, ciao, lele. -- nickname: Lele Gaifax | Quando vivrò di quello che ho pensato ieri real: Emanuele Gaifas | comincerò ad aver paura di chi mi copia. l...@nautilus.homeip.net | -- Fortunato Depero, 1929. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
