PySpark — UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character

Question

Loading a dataframe with foreign characters (åäö) into Spark using spark.read.csv, with encoding='utf-8' and trying to do a simple show().

>>> df.show()

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/usr/lib/spark/python/pyspark/sql/dataframe.py", line 287, in show
print(self._jdf.showString(n, truncate))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\ufffd' in position 579: ordinal not in range(128)

I figure this is probably related to Python itself but I cannot understand how any of the tricks that are mentioned here for example can be applied in the context of PySpark and the show()-function.

Answer 1

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-11772 talks about this issue and gives a solution that runs:

export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8

before running pyspark. I wonder why above works, because sys.getdefaultencoding() returned utf-8 for me even without it.

How to set sys.stdout encoding in Python 3? also talks about this and gives the following solution for Python 3:

import sys
sys.stdout = open(sys.stdout.fileno(), mode='w', encoding='utf8', buffering=1)

Answer 2

import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

This works for me, I am setting the encoding upfront and it is valid throughout the script.