On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:46:37 -0600, Robert Kern wrote: > On 1/20/11 8:31 AM, Helmut Jarausch wrote: >> Hi, >> I've searched the net but didn't find the information I need. Using >> Python-2.7.1, I know, I can't modify defaultencoding at run time. > > You're not supposed to. It must remain 'ascii'. Otherwise, you will > break dict lookups among other things. Can you be specific about why you > think you want to change this? What are you trying to achieve? It looks > like you are conflating a variety of different behaviors below. > >> Python even ignores >> export PYTHONIOENCODING=ISO8859-1 >> >> locale.getdefaultlocale()[1] >> returns >> 'ISO8859-1' > > This does not introspect the same thing as sys.getdefaultencoding(). > >> still sys.stdout is using the ascii codec. > > This reflects your terminal settings, not sys.getdefaultencoding(). I'm > not sure why the PYTHONIOENCODING variable isn't affecting that. It > works fine for me. > >> How can I recompile Python (itself) to change this to iso8859-1 ? (My >> favourite editor cannot be told to use unicode.) > > You wouldn't want to change sys.getdefaultencoding() for this. That > parameter affects how str and unicode objects are converted between each > other without an explicit .encode()/.decode() call, not what encoding > Python assumes for the parsing of the code. > > Instead, you want to use an encoding declaration in each file: > > http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#encoding- declarations
Thanks Robert, probably I wasn't too clear about my issue. I couldn't "print" any non-ascii character to my console although my console has an en_US.iso88591 locale. I didn't modfiy anything in Python's source code. I noticed that my root account still had an ASCII locale. Now I have changed it such that the root account has the same locale as non-root accounts. Recompiling Python under such a root account has rectified things. Now I can print non-ascii characters if they are properly encoded. Thanks, Helmut. -- -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
