All About Python and Unicode

Set the environmental variable LC_CTYPE to something like "en_US.utf-8" for utf-8 output. I don't know where it's documented; I just found it on some guy's blog a while ago. This also apparently doesn't work if python's stdin isn't a console (i.e. it's a pipe), but for interactive sessions it's good enough.

Simply encode your unicode string in utf-8 and print the resulting bytestring. Simple, huh?

Okay, say you don't want to do u"somestring".encode('utf-8') all the time. Python has a set of classes that will wrap files and transparently encode and decode for you. And stdout is just another file.

  import sys
  import codecs
  sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter("utf-8")(sys.stdout)
  line = u"\u0411"
  print line