php system, python and utf-8

Question

I have a python program running very well. It connects to several websites and outputs the desired information. Since not all websites are encoded with utf-8, I am requestin

Answer 1

When you run the python script in your terminal, your terminal is likely to be encoded in UTF8 (specially if you are using linux or mac).

When you set l variable to "some string with latin characters", that string will be encoded to the default encoding, if you are using a terminal l will be UTF8 and the script wont crash.

A little tip: if you have a string encoded in latin1 and you want it in unicode you can do:

variable.decode('latin1')