Python, Unicode, and the Windows console

Question

When I try to print a Unicode string in a Windows console, I get a UnicodeEncodeError: \'charmap\' codec can\'t encode character .... error. I assume this is b

Answer 1

TL;DR:

print(yourstring.encode('ascii','replace'));

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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 ?.