python getpass encoding

Question

Imagine I have the following code:

  # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  from getpass import getpass

  #print u'Введите пароль!'.encode('cp866')
  passwd = getpass (u'Введите пароль!'.encode('cp866'))

This is for asking user to enter his password in Windows console (thus encoding is 'cp866'). The user sees the following prompt: "???¤?a? ? aR?i!" But if you uncomment the line with print, you will see the correct text. I already have a workaround, first make a print statement, then issue getpass with empty prompt, but I just want to know what exactly is wrong with my code and why do I get this result? One hint if it make it clearer: getpass uses msvcrt.putch (char) to put characters on the console.

Answer 1

putch() might be doing its own translation from your ANSI codepage (cp1251) to your OEM codepage (cp866). Try encoding with cp1251 instead.