Printing to stdout with encoding in Python 3 [duplicate]

Question

I have a Python 3 program that reads some strings from a Windows-1252 encoded file:

with open(file, 'r', encoding="cp1252") as file_with_strings:
    # save some strings

Which I later want to write to stdout. I've tried to do:

print(some_string)
# => UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xe9' in position 180: ordinal not in range(128)

print(some_string.decode("utf-8"))
# => AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'decode'

sys.stdout.buffer.write(some_str)
# => TypeError: 'str' does not support the buffer interface

print(some_string.encode("cp1252").decode("utf-8"))
# => UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 180: invalid continuation byte

print(some_string.encode("cp1252"))
# => has the unfortunate result of printing b'<my string>' instead of just the string

I'm scratching my head here. I'd like to print the string I got from the file just as it appears there, in cp1252. (In my terminal, when I do more $file, these characters appear as question marks, so my terminal is probably ascii.)

Would love some clarification! Thanks!

Answer 1

Since Python 3.7, you can change the encoding of all text written to sys.stdout with the reconfigure method:

import sys

sys.stdout.reconfigure(encoding="cp1252")

That could be helpful if you need to change the encoding for all output from your program.

Answer 2

To anybody out there with the same problem, I ended up doing:

to_print = (some_string + "\n").encode("cp1252")
sys.stdout.buffer.write(to_print)
sys.stdout.flush() # I write a ton of these strings, and segfaulted without flushing