Question

I am wondering why i can use print to print a unicode string in my OSX Terminal.app, but if i redirect stdout to a file or pipe it to ‘more’, i get an UnicodeEncodeError.
How does python decides whether it prints unicode or throws an exception.

Answer 1

Because your terminal encoding is set correctly and when you redirect to a file (or pipe) the encoding is set to the default encoding (ASCII in python2.) try print sys.stdout.encoding in both time (when you run your script as the terminal as stdout and when you redirect to a file) and you will see the difference.

Try also this in your command line:

$ python -c 'import sys; print sys.stdout.encoding;'
UTF8
$ python -c 'import sys; print sys.stdout.encoding;' | cat
None

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