How to print Unicode in Python 2 when LANG=C

Question

Quite a silly question, I know. Of course normally LANG=C indicates an ASCII terminal which cannot display Unicode characters. But I nevertheless want to print out the UTF-8 bytes. I use Python 2 (2.6.5 actually)

print '\xc3\xa4', u'\xe4'

This prints 'ä ä' on a Unicode terminal, but the second string causes an error when executed with LANG=C. I don't want Python to be smart but simply convert u'\xe4' to UTF-8 so it's just '\xc3\xa4' in memory.

I tried all combinations of decode(), encode() and unicode() that I can imagine but it seems I missed the right combination.

What I actually want is reading Unicode charaters through vi's system() function, like

:echo system('python foo.py')

Wooble · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-13 12:09:36Z

2

To encode a unicode to utf-8, call .encode('utf-8') on it.:

>>> u'\xe4'.encode('utf-8')
'\xc3\xa4'

edited Jul 13, 2012 at 12:09

answered Jul 12, 2012 at 18:31

Wooble

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1 Comment

buergi Over a year ago

Hm ok that works in the with LANG=C python foo.py I could swear I tried that one.

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