[Python-Dev] Proposal: new environment variable PYTHONSTDOUTENCODING (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Tue May 20 12:36:39 CEST 2008

On 2008-05-20 12:16, Thomas Wouters wrote:

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 10:41 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

On 2008-05-20 10:22, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

I'd like to propose a new environment variable PYTHONSTDOUTENCODING. This is meant to solve various problems that people had with Python not detecting their terminal encoding correctly; it would override any detection that Python would use for determining the encoding of stdout (and stdin - but that's less relevant in 2.x). How is this relevant for 2.x ? In 2.x, stdin and stdout are just files without any io wrappers around them. Writing Unicode to stdout will still use the default encoding ASCII to convert it to an 8-bit string. All other 8-bit strings will be passed to stdout as-is. You're forgetting about print; in Python 2.x, when stdout is connected to a terminal, the locale settings (typically the LANG, LCALL and LCCTYPE environment variables) are taken into account when 'print' writes to sys.stdout.

Thanks for reminding me. I had forgotten about that special case.

So "sys.stdout.write(unicode)" will always use the default encoding, whereas "print unicode" uses the sys.stdout.encoding, correct ?

Hmm, wouldn't it be better to always use .encoding and also make it adjustable from Python (it is adjustable from C) ?!

PYTHONSTDOUTENCODING could then provide the default to sys.stdout.encoding.

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