UnicodeEncodeError on Windows - encoding / charmap problem

[pyinstaller-tickets-migration]

Original date: 2012/01/22

The execution of following code:

print u'confusing cat: \u0283i-wa\u0127\u0259d' 

fails with an UnicodeEncodeError when compiled with pyInstaller-1.5-rc1 on Windows XP SP3. The full traceback:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File ".\pyInstallerUnicodeIssue\build\pyi.win32\pyInstallerUnicodeIssue\outPYZ1.pyz/encodings.cp850", line 12, in encode
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\u0283'
in position 15: character maps to <undefined> 

It seems that the environment variable PYTHONIOENCODING has to be set somewhere in the Makespec/Build process. I tried to set it manually to "utf_8" at build and execution time and the error was gone. But: By now I wasn't able to reproduce it.

Also the following hack at the beginning of the module worked for me:

import sys
import codecs
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf8')(sys.stdout) 

Although it seems at first that the error only occurs in context of stdout I had the same problems with third-party libraries too.

See also this thread on the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/pyinstaller/browse_thread/thread/7bad082b306a0ea6/4164cdac4d926468

[matysek]

Original date: 2013/03/19

This is the issue of the python itself in the windows console. If you will run that code with python directly from windows console you will get the same error.