Don't argparse read unicode from commandline?

Question

Running Python 2.7

When executing:

$ python client.py get_emails -a \"åäö\"

I get:

usage: client.py get_emails [-h] [-a         


        

Answer 1

The command-line arguments are encoded using sys.getfilesystemencoding():

import sys

def commandline_arg(bytestring):
    unicode_string = bytestring.decode(sys.getfilesystemencoding())
    return unicode_string

# ...
parser_get_emails.add_argument('-a', '--area', type=commandline_arg)

Note: You don't need it in Python 3 (the arguments are already Unicode). It uses os.fsdecode() in this case because sometimes command-line arguments might be undecodable. See PEP 383 -- Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces.