Setting the correct encoding when piping stdout in Python

Question

When piping the output of a Python program, the Python interpreter gets confused about encoding and sets it to None. This means a program like this:

# -*- co         


        

Answer 1

First, regarding this solution:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
print u"åäö".encode('utf-8')

It's not practical to explicitly print with a given encoding every time. That would be repetitive and error-prone.

A better solution is to change sys.stdout at the start of your program, to encode with a selected encoding. Here is one solution I found on Python: How is sys.stdout.encoding chosen?, in particular a comment by "toka":

import sys
import codecs
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf8')(sys.stdout)