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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T21:17:06+00:00

After I learned about reading unicode files in Python 3.0 web script, now it’s

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After I learned about reading unicode files in Python 3.0 web script, now it’s time for me to learn using print() with unicode.

I searched for writing unicode, for example this question explains that you can’t write unicode characters to non-unicode console. However, in my case, the output is given to Apache and I am sure that it is capable of handling unicode text. For some reason, however, the stdout of my web script is in ascii.

Obviously, if I was opening a file to write myself, I would do something like

open(filename, 'w', encoding='utf8')

but since I’m given an open stream, I resorted to using 

sys.stdout.buffer.write(mytext.encode('utf-8'))

and everything seems to work. Does this violate some rule of good behavior or has any unintended consequences?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I don’t think you’re breaking any rule, but

    sys.stdout = codecs.EncodedFile(sys.stdout, 'utf8')

    looks like it might be handier / less clunky.

    Edit: per comments, this isn’t quite right — @Miles gave the right variant (thanks!):

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

    Edit: if you can arrange for environment variable PYTHONIOENCODING to be set to utf8 when Apache starts your script, that would be even better, making sys.stdout be set to utf8 automatically; but if that’s unfeasible or impractical the codecs solution stands.

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