Why can't I display a unicode character in the Python Interpreter on Mac OS X Terminal.app?

Question

If I try to paste a unicode character such as the middle dot:

·

in my python interpreter it does nothing. I'm using Terminal.app on Mac OS X and when I'm simply in in bash I have no trouble:

:~$ ·

But in the interpreter:

:~$ python
Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Feb 11 2010, 00:51:29) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 

^^ I get nothing, it just ignores that I just pasted the character. If I use the escape \xNN\xNN representation of the middle dot '\xc2\xb7', and try to convert to unicode, trying to show the dot causes the interpreter to throw an error:

>>> unicode('\xc2\xb7')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

I have setup 'utf-8' as my default encoding in sitecustomize.py so:

>>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'utf-8'

What gives? It's not the Terminal. It's not Python, what am I doing wrong?!

This question is not related to this question, as that indivdiual is able to paste unicode into his Terminal.

Answer 1

unicode('\xc2\xb7') means to decode the byte string in question with the default codec, which is ascii -- and that of course fails (trying to set a different default encoding has never worked well, and in particular doesn't apply to "pasted literals" -- that would require a different setting anyway). You could use instead u'\xc2\xb7', and see:

>>> print(u'\xc2\xb7')
·

since those are two unicode characters of course. While:

>>> print(u'\uc2b7')
슷

gives you a single unicode character (of some oriental persuasion -- sorry, I'm ignorant about these things). BTW, neither of these is the "middle dot" you were looking for. Maybe you mean

>>> print('\xc2\xb7'.decode('utf8'))
·

which is the middle dot. BTW, for me (python 2.6.4 from python.org on a Mac Terminal.app):

>>> print('슷')
슷

which kind of surprised me (I expected an error...!-).