On 03/04/2014 05:05 PM, Peter Otten wrote: > Francis Moreau wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> In my understanding (I'm relatively new to python), I need to decode any >> bytes data provided, in my case, by a shell command (such as findmnt) >> started by the subprocess module. The goal of my application is to parse >> the command outputs. >> >> My application runs only on linux BTW and should run fine on both python >> 2.7 and py3k. >> >> My question is when decoding the output bytes data of the external >> command, which encoding should I use ? >> >> Should I guess the encoding by inspecting LANG or any LC_* environment >> variables ? >> >> Should I force one of those environment variable to a specific value >> before running my external command ? >> >> Thanks for any tips. > > You can use locale.getpreferredencoding(), which seems to evaluate LANG: > > $ python3 -c 'import locale; print(locale.getpreferredencoding())' > UTF-8 > $ LANG= python3 -c 'import locale; print(locale.getpreferredencoding())' > ANSI_X3.4-1968
Hmm I'm confused here: when unsetting or changing LANG, the encoding is changed on the fly that makes me wonder which part of the linux system encodes the command output. I don't think it's the latter, is the libc ? Thanks -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list