How to change the stdin and stdout encoding on Python 2
I'm using Windows and Linux machines for the same project. The default encoding for stdin on Windows is cp1252, and on Linux it is utf-8.
I would like to change everything to utf-8. Is it possible? How can I do it?
This question is about Python 2; for Python 3, see Python 3: How to specify stdin encoding
Answer
You can do this by not relying on the implicit encoding when printing things. Not relying on that is a good idea in any case -- the implicit encoding is only used when printing to stdout and when stdout is connected to a terminal.
A better approach is to use unicode everywhere, and use codecs.open or codecs.getwriter everywhere. You wrap sys.stdout in an object that automatically encodes your unicode strings into UTF-8 using, for example:
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf-8')(sys.stdout)
This will only work if you use unicode everywhere, though. So, use unicode everywhere. Really, everywhere.