[Python-ideas] changing sys.stdout encoding (original) (raw)

Jim Jewett jimjjewett at gmail.com
Mon Jun 11 16:21:29 CEST 2012

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 4:48 PM, Rurpy <rurpy at yahoo.com> wrote:

I suspect the vast majority of programmers are interested in a language that allows them to effectively get done what they need to,

Agreed.

The problem is that your use case gets hit by several special cases at once.

Usually, you don't need to worry about encodings at all; the default is sufficient. Obviously not the case for you.

Usually, the answer is just to open a file (or stream) the way you want to. sys.stdout is special because you don't open it.

If you do want to change sys.stdout, usually the answer is to replace it with a different object. Apparently (though I missed the reason why) that doesn't work for you, and you need to keep using the same underlying stream.

So at that point, replacing it with a wrapped version of itself probably is the simplest solution.

The remaining problem is how to find the least bad way of doing that. Your solution does work. Adding it as an example to the docs would probably be reasonable, but someone seems to have worked pretty hard at keeping the sys module documentation short. I could personally support a wrap function on the sys.std* streams that took care of flushing before wrapping, but ... there is a cost, in that the API gets longer, and therefore harder to learn.

or applications outside of those built for your system that have a "--encoding" type flag?

There are plenty of applications with an encoding flag; I'm not sure how often it applies to sys.std*, as opposed to named files.

-jJ

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