io.StringIO encoding in python3

encoding utf-8 python-3.x stringio
Giovanni Funchal picture Giovanni Funchal · Feb 20, 2012 · Viewed 15.3k times · Source

I can't seem to find what's the default encoding for io.StringIO in Python3. Is it the locale as with stdio?

How can I change it?

With stdio, seems that just reopening with correct encoding works, but there's no such thing as reopening a StringIO.

Answer

Sven Marnach picture Sven Marnach · Feb 20, 2012

The class io.StringIO works with str objects in Python 3. That is, you can only read and write strings from a StringIO instance. There is no encoding -- you have to choose one if you want to encode the strings you got from StringIO in a bytes object, but strings themselves don't have an encoding.

(Of course strings need to be internally represented in some encoding. Depending on your interpreter, that encoding is either UCS-2 or UCS-4, but you don't see this implementation detail when working with Python.)

Related questions

How to make python 3 print() utf8

How can I make python 3 (3.1) print("Some text") to stdout in UTF-8, or how to output raw bytes? Test.py TestText = "Test - āĀēĒčČ..šŠūŪžŽ" # this is UTF-8 TestText2 = b"Test2 - \xc4\x81\xc4\x80\xc4\x93\xc4\x92\xc4\x8…

Read More
Should I use encoding declaration in Python 3?

Python 3 uses UTF-8 encoding for source-code files by default. Should I still use the encoding declaration at the beginning of every source file? Like # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Read More
Working with UTF-8 encoding in Python source

Consider: $ cat bla.py u = unicode('d…') s = u.encode('utf-8') print s $ python bla.py File "bla.py", line 1 SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xe2' in file bla.py on line 1, but no encoding declared; see http://…

Read More