How can I serve files with UTF-8 encoding using Python SimpleHTTPServer?

Question

I often use the following to quickly fire up a web server to serve HTML content from the current folder (for local testing): ``` python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000 ``` Is there a reasonably simple way I can do this, but have the server serve the files with a UTF-8 encoding rather than the system default?

Accepted Answer

Had the same problem, the following code worked for me.

To start a SimpleHTTPServer with UTF-8 encoding, simply copy/paste the following in terminal (for Python 2).

```
python -c "import SimpleHTTPServer; m = SimpleHTTPServer.SimpleHTTPRequestHandler.extensions_map; m[''] = 'text/plain'; m.update(dict([(k, v + ';charset=UTF-8') for k, v in m.items()])); SimpleHTTPServer.test();"
```

Ensure that you have the correct charset in your HTML files beforehand.

EDIT: Update for Python 3:

```
python3 -c "from http.server import test, SimpleHTTPRequestHandler as RH; RH.extensions_map={k:v+';charset=UTF-8' for k,v in RH.extensions_map.items()}; test(RH)"
```

The `test` function also accepts arguments like `port` and `bind` so that it's possible to specify the address and the port to listen on.

How can I serve files with UTF-8 encoding using Python SimpleHTTPServer?

Solution

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