I have a command line program written in Python, and when I pipe it through another program on the command line, sys.stdout.encoding is None. This makes sense, I suppose -- the output could be another program, or a file you're redirecting it into, or whatever, and it doesn't know what encoding is desired. But neither do I! This program will be used by many different people (humor me) in different ways. Should I play it safe and output only ascii (replacing non-ascii chars with question marks)? Or should I output UTF-8, since it's so widespread these days?
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4 Answers
I suggest you use the current locale.
Python2> import locale
Python2> locale.getpreferredencoding()
'UTF-8'
The system knows what it should be, and the other side, if it also uses the current locale, will do the right thing.
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You should use the value returned by locale.getpreferredencoding().
answered Feb 16, 2011 at 7:27
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
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if your application doesn't really deal with a whole lot of internationalisation, ascii should suffice. but if not, i'd say utf-8 or better still utf-16 should be the order of the day.
1 Comment
Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin
The whole point of UTF-8 is that programs that don't explicitly deal with internationalisation mostly Just Work on non-ascii data. UTF-16 is an evil non-starter in linux; even on windows it's never appropriate when you are just guessing.
You should output UTF-8 because thats what everyone should be using. It's a bug not to be. ;)
1 Comment
Weboide
Sorry this is more of a comment than a constructive answer.