Python 2.7 : LookupError: unknown encoding: cp65001 [duplicate]

Question

I have installed python 2(64 bit), on windows 8.1 (64 bit) and wanted to know pip version and for that I fired pip --version but it is giving error.

    C:\Users\ADMIN>pip --version Traceback (most recent call last):   File "c:\dev\python27\lib\runpy.py", line 162, in _run_module_as_main     "__main__", fname, loader, pkg_name)   File "c:\dev\python27\lib\runpy.py", line 72, in _run_code     exec code in run_globals   File "C:\dev\Python27\Scripts\pip.exe\__main__.py", line 5, in <module>   File "c:\dev\python27\lib\site-packages\pip\__init__.py", line 15, in <module>     from pip.vcs import git, mercurial, subversion, bazaar  # noqa   File "c:\dev\python27\lib\site-packages\pip\vcs\mercurial.py", line 10, in <module>     from pip.download import path_to_url   File "c:\dev\python27\lib\site-packages\pip\download.py", line 35, in <module>     from pip.utils.ui import DownloadProgressBar, DownloadProgressSpinner   File "c:\dev\python27\lib\site-packages\pip\utils\ui.py", line 51, in <module>     _BaseBar = _select_progress_class(IncrementalBar, Bar)   File "c:\dev\python27\lib\site-packages\pip\utils\ui.py", line 44, in _select_progress_class     six.text_type().join(characters).encode(encoding) LookupError: unknown encoding: cp65001 

Note : The same command works fine for python 3. I have uninstalled both and installed again but still no success.

Answer 1

The error means that Unicode characters that your script are trying to print can't be represented using the current console character encoding.

Also try to run set PYTHONIOENCODING=UTF-8 after execute pip --version without reloading terminal if everything going well add PYTHONIOENCODING as env variable with value UTF-8. See How to set the path and environment variables in Windows article to get info how to add Windows variable.

NOTE: For PowerShell use $env:PYTHONIOENCODING = "UTF-8"

Also you can try to install win-unicode-console with pip:

pip install win-unicode-console 

Then reload your terminal and try to execute pip --version

However you can follow suggestions from Windows cmd encoding change causes Python crash answer because you have same problem.