Python Unicode and the Windows console

Question

When I try to print a Unicode string in a Windows console  I get an error   UnicodeEncodeError   charmap  codec can t encode character      I assume this is because the Windows console does not accept Unicode-only characters  What s the best way around this  Is there any way I can make Python automatically print a   instead of failing in this situation  Edit   I m using Python 2 5   Note   LasseV Karlsen answer with the checkmark is sort of outdated  from 2008   Please use the solutions answers suggestions below with care    JFSebastian answer is more relevant as of today  6 Jan 2016

User · Answer

Kind of related on the answer by J  F  Sebastian  but more direct   If you are having this problem when printing to the console terminal  then do this    gt set PYTHONIOENCODING UTF-8

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The cause of your problem is NOT the Win console not willing to accept Unicode  as it does this since I guess Win2k by default   It is the default system encoding  Try this code and see what it gives you  import sys sys getdefaultencoding    if it says ascii  there s your cause  -  You have to create a file called sitecustomize py and put it under python path  I put it under  usr lib python2 5 site-packages  but that is differen on Win - it is c  python lib site-packages or something   with the following contents  import sys sys setdefaultencoding  utf-8    and perhaps you might want to specify the encoding in your files as well    - - coding  UTF-8 - - import sys time  Edit  more info can be found in excellent the Dive into Python book

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James Sulak asked      Is there any way I can make Python automatically print a   instead of failing in this situation    Other solutions recommend we attempt to modify the Windows environment or replace Python s print   function   The answer below comes closer to fulfilling Sulak s request   Under Windows 7  Python 3 5 can be made to print Unicode without throwing a UnicodeEncodeError as follows    nbsp   nbsp  In place of   nbsp   nbsp print text   nbsp   nbsp  substitute   nbsp   nbsp  print str text  encode  utf-8     Instead of throwing an exception  Python now displays unprintable Unicode characters as  xNN hex codes  e g     nbsp  Halmalo n xe2 x80 x99 xc3 xa9tait plus qu xe2 x80 x99un point noir  Instead of   nbsp  Halmalo n     tait plus qu   un point noir  Granted  the latter is preferable ceteris paribus  but otherwise the former is completely accurate for diagnostic messages   Because it displays Unicode as literal byte values the former may also assist in diagnosing encode decode problems   Note  The str   call above is needed because otherwise encode   causes Python to reject a Unicode character as a tuple of numbers

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If you re not interested in getting a reliable representation of the bad character s  you might use something like this  working with python    2 6  including 3 x    from   future   import print function import sys  def safeprint s       try          print s      except UnicodeEncodeError          if sys version info  gt    3                print s encode  utf8   decode sys stdout encoding           else              print s encode  utf8     safeprint u  N EM DASH      The bad character s  in the string will be converted in a representation which is printable by the Windows console

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Like Giampaolo Rodol   s answer  but even more dirty  I really  really intend to spend a long time  soon  understanding the whole subject of encodings and how they apply to Windoze consoles    For the moment I just wanted sthg which would mean my program would NOT CRASH  and which I understood     and also which didn t involve importing too many exotic modules  in particular I m using Jython  so half the time a Python module turns out not in fact to be available    def pr s       try          print s      except UnicodeEncodeError          for c in s              try                  print  c  end                 except UnicodeEncodeError                  print       end       NB  pr  is shorter to type than  print   and quite a bit shorter to type than  safeprint

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Despite the other plausible-sounding answers that suggest changing the code page to 65001  that does not work   Also  changing the default encoding using sys setdefaultencoding is not a good idea    See this question for details and code that does work

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TL DR   print yourstring encode  ascii   replace         I ran into this myself  working on a Twitch chat  IRC  bot   Python 2 7 latest   I wanted to parse chat messages in order to respond     msg   s recv 1024  decode  utf-8     but also print them safely to the console in a human-readable format   print msg encode  ascii   replace       This corrected the issue of the bot throwing UnicodeEncodeError   charmap  errors and replaced the unicode characters with

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Note  This answer is sort of outdated  from 2008   Please use the solution below with care      Here is a page that details the problem and a solution  search the page for the text Wrapping sys stdout into an instance    PrintFails - Python Wiki  Here s a code excerpt from that page     python -c  import sys  codecs  locale  print sys stdout encoding        sys stdout   codecs getwriter locale getpreferredencoding    sys stdout         line   u  u0411 n   print type line   len line         sys stdout write line   print line    UTF-8    lt type  unicode  gt  2              python -c  import sys  codecs  locale  print sys stdout encoding        sys stdout   codecs getwriter locale getpreferredencoding    sys stdout         line   u  u0411 n   print type line   len line         sys stdout write line   print line    cat   None    lt type  unicode  gt  2           There s some more information on that page  well worth a read

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Just enter this code in command line before executing python script   chcp 65001  amp  set PYTHONIOENCODING utf-8

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The below code will make Python output to console as UTF-8 even on Windows    The console will display the characters well on Windows 7 but on Windows XP it will not display them well  but at least it will work and most important you will have a consistent output from your script on all platforms  You ll be able to redirect the output to a file   Below code was tested with Python 2 6 on Windows       usr bin python   - - coding  UTF-8 - -  import codecs  sys  reload sys  sys setdefaultencoding  utf-8    print sys getdefaultencoding    if sys platform     win32       try          import win32console      except          print  Python Win32 Extensions module is required  n You can download it from https   sourceforge net projects pywin32   x86 and x64 builds are available  n          exit -1        win32console implementation  of SetConsoleCP does not return a value       CP UTF8   65001     win32console SetConsoleCP 65001      if  win32console GetConsoleCP      65001           raise Exception   Cannot set console codepage to 65001  UTF-8        win32console SetConsoleOutputCP 65001      if  win32console GetConsoleOutputCP      65001           raise Exception   Cannot set console output codepage to 65001  UTF-8      import sys  codecs sys stdout   codecs getwriter  utf8   sys stdout  sys stderr   codecs getwriter  utf8   sys stderr   print  This is an   amp   testing Unicode support using Arabic  Latin  Cyrillic  Greek  Hebrew and CJK code points  n

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For Python 2 try   print unicode string   unicode-escape     For Python 3 try   import os string    002 Could ve Would ve Should ve  os system  echo     string    Or try win-unicode-console   pip install win-unicode-console py -mrun your script py

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Python 3 6 windows7  There is several way to launch a python you could use the python console  which has a python logo on it  or the windows console  it s written cmd exe on it     I could not print utf8 characters in the windows console  Printing utf-8 characters throw me this error   OSError   winError 87  The paraneter is incorrect  Exception ignored in    io-TextIOwrapper name   stdout   mode  w    encoding  utf8    OSError   WinError 87  The parameter is incorrect    After trying and failing to understand the answer above I discovered it was only a setting problem  Right click on the top of the cmd console windows  on the tab font chose lucida console

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Update  Python 3 6 implements PEP 528  Change Windows console encoding to UTF-8  the default console on Windows will now accept all Unicode characters  Internally  it uses the same Unicode API as the win-unicode-console package mentioned below  print unicode string  should just work now        I get a UnicodeEncodeError   charmap  codec can t encode character     error     The error means that Unicode characters that you are trying to print can t be represented using the current  chcp  console character encoding  The codepage is often 8-bit encoding such as cp437 that can represent only  0x100 characters from  1M Unicode characters       u  N EURO SIGN   encode  cp437   Traceback  most recent call last       UnicodeEncodeError   charmap  codec can t encode character   u20ac  in position 0  character maps to      I assume this is because the Windows console does not accept Unicode-only characters  What s the best way around this     Windows console does accept Unicode characters and it can even display them  BMP only  if the corresponding font is configured  WriteConsoleW   API should be used as suggested in  Daira Hopwood s answer  It can be called transparently i e   you don t need to and should not modify your scripts if you use win-unicode-console package   T   gt  py -mpip install win-unicode-console T   gt  py -mrun your script py   See What s the deal with Python 3 4  Unicode  different languages and Windows      Is there any way I can make Python   automatically print a   instead of failing in this situation    If it is enough to replace all unencodable characters with   in your case then you could set PYTHONIOENCODING envvar   T   gt  set PYTHONIOENCODING  replace T   gt  python3 -c  print u   N EURO SIGN            In Python 3 6   the encoding specified by PYTHONIOENCODING envvar is ignored for interactive console buffers unless PYTHONLEGACYWINDOWSIOENCODING envvar is set to a non-empty string

[python] Python, Unicode, and the Windows console

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