unicode - How to print utf-8 to console with Python 3.4 (Windows 8)?

Question

I'm trying to print utf-8 card symbols (?,?,???,?) from a python module to a windows console. The console that I'm using is git bash and I'm using console2 as a front-end. I've tried/read a number of approaches below and nothing has worked so far.

• Made sure the console can handle utf-8 characters. These two tests make me believe that the console isn't the problem.

  

• Attempt the same thing from the python module.
  When I execute the .py, this is the result.

   print(u'?')
   UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character 'u2660' in position 0: character maps to <undefined>
  

• Attempt to encode ?. This gives me back the unicode set encoded in utf-8, but still no spade symbol.

   text = '?'
   print(text.encode('utf-8'))
   b'xe2x99xa0'
  

I feel like I'm missing a step or not understanding the whole encode/decode process. I've read this, this, and this. The last of the pages suggests wrapping the sys.stdout into the code but this article says using stdout is unnecessary and points to another page using the codecs module.

Answer 1

What I'm trying to do is print utf-8 card symbols (?,?,?,?) from a python module to a windows console

UTF-8 is a byte encoding of Unicode characters. ???? are Unicode characters which can be reproduced in a variety of encodings and UTF-8 is one of those encodings—as a UTF, UTF-8 can reproduce any Unicode character. But there is nothing specifically “UTF-8” about those characters.

Other encodings that can reproduce the characters ???? are Windows code page 850 and 437, which your console is likely to be using under a Western European install of Windows. You can print ? in these encodings but you are not using UTF-8 to do so, and you won't be able to use other Unicode characters that are available in UTF-8 but outside the scope of these code pages.

print(u'?')
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character 'u2660'

In Python 3 this is the same as the print('?') test you did above, so there is something different about how you are invoking the script containing this print, compared to your py -3.4. What does sys.stdout.encoding give you from the script?

To get print working correctly you would have to make sure Python picks up the right encoding. If it is not doing that adequately from the terminal settings you would indeed have to set PYTHONIOENCODING to cp437.

>>> text = '?'
>>> print(text.encode('utf-8'))
b'xe2x99xa0'

print can only print Unicode strings. For other types including the bytes string that results from the encode() method, it gets the literal representation (repr) of the object. b'xe2x99xa0' is how you would write a Python 3 bytes literal containing a UTF-8 encoded ?.

If what you want to do is bypass print's implicit encoding to PYTHONIOENCODING and substitute your own, you can do that explicitly:

>>> import sys
>>> sys.stdout.buffer.write('?'.encode('cp437'))

This will of course generate wrong output for any consoles not running code page 437 (eg non-Western-European installs). Generally, for apps using the C stdio, like Python does, getting non-ASCII characters to the Windows console is just too unreliable to bother with.