How to print UTF-8 encoded text to the console in Python < 3?

Question

I'm running a recent Linux system where all my locales are UTF-8:

LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
...
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Now I want to write UTF-8 encoded content to the console.

Right now Python uses UTF-8 for the FS encoding but sticks to ASCII for the default encoding :-(

>>> import sys
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'ascii'
>>> sys.getfilesystemencoding()
'UTF-8'

I thought the best (clean) way to do this was setting the PYTHONIOENCODING environment variable. But it seems that Python ignores it. At least on my system I keep getting ascii as default encoding, even after setting the envvar.

# tried this in ~/.bashrc and ~/.profile (also sourced them)
# and on the commandline before running python
export PYTHONIOENCODING=UTF-8

If I do the following at the start of a script, it works though:

>>> import sys
>>> reload(sys)  # to enable `setdefaultencoding` again
<module 'sys' (built-in)>
>>> sys.setdefaultencoding("UTF-8")
>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'UTF-8'

But that approach seems unclean. So, what's a good way to accomplish this?

Workaround

Instead of changing the default encoding - which is not a good idea (see mesilliac's answer) - I just wrap sys.stdout with a StreamWriter like this:

sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter(locale.getpreferredencoding())(sys.stdout)

See this gist for a small utility function, that handles it.

Answer 1

It seems accomplishing this is not recommended.

Fedora suggested using the system locale as the default, but apparently this breaks other things.

Here's a quote from the mailing-list discussion:

The only supported default encodings in Python are:

 Python 2.x: ASCII
 Python 3.x: UTF-8

If you change these, you are on your own and strange things will
start to happen. The default encoding does not only affect
the translation between Python and the outside world, but also
all internal conversions between 8-bit strings and Unicode.

Hacks like what's happening in the pango module (setting the
default encoding to 'utf-8' by reloading the site module in
order to get the sys.setdefaultencoding() API back) are just
downright wrong and will cause serious problems since Unicode
objects cache their default encoded representation.

Please don't enable the use of a locale based default encoding.

If all you want to achieve is getting the encodings of
stdout and stdin correctly setup for pipes, you should
instead change the .encoding attribute of those (only).

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com