Python script prints unicode, use in shell ` ` causes error

Question

I have a Python script called a.py:

#!/usr/bin/python2.7
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
print u''

In both bash and tcsh:

$ a.py
Ô£øÔ£øÔ£øÔ£ø
$ echo `a.py`
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "a.py", line 3, in <module>
    print u'Ô£øÔ£øÔ£øÔ£ø'
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-3: ordinal not in range(128)

The error is coming from Python, not the shell. How can running the script under backticks affect the script itself? Note that this is not a problem if I switch the interpreter to Python 3 at the beginning of the script.

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:32:18Z

9

When Python does not detect that it is printing to a terminal, as is the case when in a subshell, sys.stdout.encoding is set to None. When you print a unicode, the ascii codec is used (at least in Python2). This will result in a UnicodeError if the unicode contains code points outside of 0-127.

A way to fix this is to set the PYTHONIOENCODING environment variable to an appropriate encoding. For example:

export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8; echo `a.py`

Credits for this go to unutbu!

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:32

CommunityBot

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answered Apr 3, 2017 at 19:44

R. Q.

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1 Comment

Mitchell Model Over a year ago

Wow. I never would have figured this out. So I tried adding this to a.py: import os os.putenv('PYTHONIOENCODING', 'utf-8') but that doesn't work. Probably my lack of experience with bash (I mostly use tcsh), but I don't understand why your solution works but this doesn't.

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