Does python's print function handle unicode differently now than when Dive Into Python was written?
character-encoding, python, unicode
Solution
The default encoding for `print` doesn't depend on `sys.getdefaultencoding()`, but on `sys.stdout.encoding`. If you launch python with e.g. `LANG=C` or redirect a python script to a file, the encoding for stdout will be `ANSI_X3.4-1968`. On the other hand, if `sys.stdout` is a terminal, it will use the terminal's encoding.
To explain what `sys.getdefaultencoding()` does -- it's used when implicitly converting strings from/to unicode. In this example, `str(u'La Pe\xf1a')` with the default ASCII encoding would fail, but with modified default encoding it would encode the string to Latin-1. However setting the default encoding is a horrible idea, you should always use explicit encoding when you want to go from `unicode` to `str`.
Problem
I'm trying to work my way through some frustrating encoding issues by going back to basics. In Dive Into Python example 9.14 (here) we have this: ``` >>> s = u'La Pe\xf1a' >>> print s Traceback (innermost last): File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ? UnicodeError: ASCII encoding error: ordinal not in range(128) >>> print s.encode('latin-1') La Peña ``` But on my machine, this happens: ``` >>> sys.getdefaultencoding() 'ascii' >>> s = u'La Pe\xf1a' >>> print s La Peña ``` I don't understand why these are different. Anybody?