Class has method that shows in intellisense, but gives an error when running it.

Question

I'm tring to set the default encoding of my console to UTF-8 so it can display cyrillic letters and accented letters.

Here is my code:

from Parser import parser
import sys

print sys.getdefaultencoding()
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

Output:

ascii
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\Sergio.Tapia\Documents\NetBeansProjects\BabylonPython\src\TestingGrounds.py", line 5, in <module>
    sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'setdefaultencoding'

The weird thing is, when pressing the '.' after sys to see what method it has, setdefaultencoding is shown as a possible choice. Any suggestion on what to do?

Answer 1

The function sys.setdefaultencoding() does exist but is removed from sys' dictionary by site.py itself.

On my machine, site.py contains the following comment:

# Remove sys.setdefaultencoding() so that users cannot change the
# encoding after initialization.  The test for presence is needed when
# this module is run as a script, because this code is executed twice.

Answer 2

From http://docs.python.org/library/sys.html

This function is only intended to be used by the site module implementation and, where needed, by sitecustomize.