Help me understand why Unicode only works sometimes with Python

Question

Here\'s a little program:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

print(\'abcd kΩ ☠ °C √Hz µF ü ☃ ♥\')  
print(u\'abcd kΩ ☠ °C √Hz µF ü ☃ ♥\')
         


        

Answer 1

There are two possible reasons:

• Encoding of Unicode by print. You cannot output raw Unicode, so print needs to figure out how to convert it to the byte stream expected by the console (it uses sys.stdout.encoding AFAIK), which brings us to
• Console support. Python does not control your terminal, so if it spits out UTF-8 while your terminal expects something else, you'll get mangled output.