How to print list of unicode in Python3

Question

How do you "just print" a list containing unicode in Python3?

In Python2.*, I could simply do:

text = ['\u2014']
print(text)

But in Python3, this fails with the notorious error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\u2014' in position 2: ordinal not in range(128)

Unfortunately, the normal recommendations to use str() fail because this only works with bytes in Python3, not lists:

>>> print(str(text, encoding='utf-8', errors='ignore'))
TypeError: coercing to str: need a bytes-like object, list found

How did it not work? repl.it/Hx2H , it seems fine when running the code from repl.it — Taku
– Taku, Commented May 14, 2017 at 21:54
The first question to ask is why your stdout is ASCII. Look into changing your locale to use UTF-8. But if ASCII is your only choice, you can set the environment variable PYTHONIOENCODING=:backslashreplace. — Eryk Sun
– Eryk Sun, Commented May 14, 2017 at 21:59
@eryksun, Please submit an answer as an answer, not a comment. — Cerin
– Cerin, Commented May 18, 2017 at 18:31
@eryksun, Why the passive aggressiveness? I'm trying to help you out and give you credit. Just use the site as intended and submit an answer. — Cerin
– Cerin, Commented May 19, 2017 at 9:18

Mark Tolonen · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-15 03:05:06Z

1

To get equivalent behavior to Python 2 for printing lists in Python 3, use ascii():

>>> text = ['\u2014']
>>> print(ascii(text))
['\u2014']

answered May 15, 2017 at 3:05

Mark Tolonen

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