Why should we NOT use sys.setdefaultencoding(“utf-8”) in a py script?

Question

I have seen few py scripts which use this at the top of the script. In what cases one should use it?

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding(\"utf-8\")         


        

Answer 1

#!/usr/bin/env python
#-*- coding: utf-8 -*-
u = u'moçambique'
print u.encode("utf-8")
print u

chmod +x test.py
./test.py
moçambique
moçambique

./test.py > output.txt
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./test.py", line 5, in 
    print u
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character 
u'\xe7' in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)

on shell works , sending to sdtout not , so that is one workaround, to write to stdout .

I made other approach, which is not run if sys.stdout.encoding is not define, or in others words , need export PYTHONIOENCODING=UTF-8 first to write to stdout.

import sys
if (sys.stdout.encoding is None):            
    print >> sys.stderr, "please set python env PYTHONIOENCODING=UTF-8, example: export PYTHONIOENCODING=UTF-8, when write to stdout." 
    exit(1)

so, using same example:

export PYTHONIOENCODING=UTF-8
./test.py > output.txt

will work