To answer the OP's original question: On Jan 20, 2:31 pm, Helmut Jarausch <jarau...@skynet.be> 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.
I think you can. There is a function setdefaultencoding in the sys module, but at startup when site.py runs the function gets deleted after it has been used, because as others have said it is a *bad* idea to change the default encoding (although I *think* changing it to utf8 should cause no harm). so if you reload sys, setdefaultencoding() becomes available again, and you can use it, with all the caveats mentioned: import sys reload(sys) sys.setdefaultencoding( 'utf-8' ) This works on a Unicode build of Python only. As has been said, you can change the default encoding in site.py, but this means that it gets changed for everyone/every Python program on the system, using setdefaultencoding() as above only changes it for the running program, and hopefully the change will have been made by someone who knows what they are doing and is aware of the possible consequences. > Python even ignores > export PYTHONIOENCODING=ISO8859-1 > > locale.getdefaultlocale()[1] > returns > 'ISO8859-1' > > still sys.stdout is using the ascii codec. > How can I recompile Python (itself) to change this to iso8859-1 ? You don't need to, nor should you. > (My favourite editor cannot be told to use unicode.) Maybe you need a new editor. scite works well with Python, and is cross-platform. John -- -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
