Mithro rants about stuff

This is not a post about using UTF-8 properly in Python, but doing evil, evil things.

Python dutifully respects the $LANG environment variable on the terminal. It turns out that a lot of the time this variable is totally wrong, it’s set to something like C even though the terminal is UTF-8 encoding.

The problem is that there is no easy way to change a file’s encoding after it’s open, well until this horrible hack! The following code will force the output encoding of stdout to UTF-8 even if started with LANG=C.

# License: MIT try: print u"\u263A" except Exception, e: print e   import sys print sys.stdout.encoding   from ctypes import pythonapi, py_object, c_char_p PyFile_SetEncoding = pythonapi.PyFile_SetEncoding PyFile_SetEncoding.argtypes = (py_object, c_char_p) if not PyFile_SetEncoding(sys.stdout, "UTF-8"): raise ValueError   try: print u"\u263A" except Exception, e: print e