How to print utf-8 to console with Python 3.4 (Windows 8)?

Question

I\'ve never fully wrapped my head around encoding and decoding unicode to other formats (utf-8, utf-16, ascii, etc.) but I\'ve reached a wall thatis both confusing and frust

Answer 1

By default, the console in Microsoft Windows only displays 256 characters (cp437, of "Code page 437", the original IBM-PC 1981 extended ASCII character set) as you say in comments.

and in other side the PYTHONIOENCODING is set to UTF-8 by default. so i think when you want to print unicode in windows you have to align sys.stdout.encoding and PYTHONIOENCODING with together !

also note that when you specify an encoding for your .py file it just use it for that code and dont change the default system encoding.

so do something like this :

import codecs
my_str='♠' # or something like my_str='\u05dd' 
my_str.encode().decode('cp437')