How can I display native accents to languages in console in windows?

Question

print "Español\nPortuguês\nItaliano".encode('utf-8')

Errors:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in print "Español\nPortuguês\nItaliano".encode('utf-8') UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xf1 in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)

I'm trying to make a multilingual console program in Windows. Is this possible? I've saved the file in utf-8 encoding as well, I get the same error.

*EDIT I"m just outputting text in this program. I change to lucida fonts, I keep getting this:

I'm just looking for a portable way to correctly display foreign languages in the console in windows. If it can do it cross platform, even better. I thought utf-8 was the answer, but all of you are telling me fonts, etc.. also plays a part. So anyone have a definitive answer?

Answer 1

This works for me:

# coding=utf-8
print "Español\nPortuguês\nItaliano"

You might want to try running it using chcp 65001 && your_program.py As well, try changing the command prompt font to Lucida Console.

Answer 2

Short answer:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
print u"Español\nPortuguês\nItaliano".encode('utf-8')

The first line tells Python that your file is encoded in UTF-8 (your editor must use the same settings) and this line should always be on the beginning of your file.

Another thing is that Python 2 knows two different basestring objects - str and unicode. The u prefix will create such a unicode object instead of the default str object, which you can then encode as UTF-8 (but printing unicode objects directly should also work).

Answer 3

First of all, in Python 2.x you can't encode a str that has non-ASCII characters. You have to write

print u"Español\nPortuguês\nItaliano".encode('utf-8')

Using UTF-8 at the Windows console is difficult.

• You have to set the Command Prompt font to a Unicode font (of which the only one available by default is Lucida Console), or else you get IBM437 encoding anyway.
• chcp 65001
• Modify encodings._aliases to treat "cp65001" as an alias of UTF-8.

And even then, it doesn't seem to work right.