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

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Tue May 20 10:22:37 CEST 2008

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).

In particular, setting this environment variable would also disable the detection of whether stdout is a terminal. This is desirable for cases as the pydev eclipse plugin, where Python currently fails to detect that the output is a terminal (and technically, what Eclipse provides is not a terminal, but just a pipe, as you can't do pseudoterms in Java).

This would have the additional effect that the encoding also gets in effect when redirecting stdout to a file. Whether or not this is a good thing might be debatable; giving the user the control over it (to set or clear that variable) is a good thing, IMO.

Naming contest: it probably would be the longest of the PYTHON* variables. I would not want to call it PYTHONENCODING, or PYTHONSTDENCODING, though, because people might infer that it affects sys.getdefaultencoding(), which it shouldn't.

Regards, Martin

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