Bug#415968: Cannot output unicode to sys.stdout when redirected to a file

[Enrico Zini]

Package: python2.4
Version: 2.4.4-2
Severity: normal

Hello,

Thanks for maintaining Python.

While I can output unicode properly on a terminal, the same script does
not work when redirected to a file:

$ cat test.py
#! /usr/bin/python
# vim:set encoding=utf-8:

import sys

def output(s):
    print s.decode('utf-8')

print sys.stdout.encoding

s = "ééé"
output("%s" % (s))

$ ./test.py
UTF-8
ééé

$ ./test.py > test
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./test.py", line 12, in ?
    output("%s" % (s))
  File "./test.py", line 7, in output
    print s.decode('utf-8')
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-2: 
ordinal not in range(128)

$ cat test
None


A work-around for this is (courtesy of MadCoder):

  import sys, codecs
  if sys.stdout.encoding is None:
    sys.stdout = codecs.open("/dev/stdout", "w", 'utf-8')


Ciao,

Enrico


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.20.1enrico
Locale: LANG=it_IT.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=it_IT.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages python2.4 depends on:
ii  libbz2-1.0                  1.0.3-6      high-quality block-sorting file co
ii  libc6                       2.3.6.ds1-13 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libdb4.4                    4.4.20-8     Berkeley v4.4 Database Libraries [
ii  libncursesw5                5.5-5        Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii  libreadline5                5.2-2        GNU readline and history libraries
ii  libssl0.9.8                 0.9.8c-4     SSL shared libraries
ii  mime-support                3.39-1       MIME files 'mime.types' & 'mailcap
ii  python2.4-minimal           2.4.4-2      A minimal subset of the Python lan

python2.4 recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information