How do I direct output to a file when there are UTF-8 characters?

Question

I have a python script that grabs a bunch of recent tweets from the twitter API and dumps them to screen. It works well, but when I try to direct the output to a file something

Answer 1

You may need encode the unicode object with .encode('utf-8')

In your python file append this to first line

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

If your script file is working standalone, append it to second line

#!/usr/local/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Here is the document: PEP 0263

Answer 2

Without modifying the script, you can just set the environment variable PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8 and Python will assume that encoding when redirecting to a file.

References:

https://docs.python.org/2.7/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHONIOENCODING https://docs.python.org/3.3/using/cmdline.html#envvar-PYTHONIOENCODING