Print non-ascii text in Python

Question

I have a dictionary of Facebook group names and group id retreived from Facebook using graph API .

When I simply Print it using

for i in name:
  print i['name']

It prints all the group names even the ones in other languages such as Arabic and French.

but for this statement

check=raw_input("Want to post in %s?(Y/N)" % i['name'])

Group names with the non English Characters are not being printed. Why is this happening?

@Puciek Now it prints it but in the unicode form like \u5411\u464\564.How to get the charecters — Stormvirux
– Stormvirux, Commented Sep 17, 2013 at 10:32
What is repr(i['name'])? What is sys.getdefaultencoding()? — Lennart Regebro
– Lennart Regebro, Commented Sep 17, 2013 at 10:40
sys.getdefaultconfig() gives 'ascii' and print repr(i['name']) gives all the names but like u'\u5411\u464\u564' — Stormvirux
– Stormvirux, Commented Sep 17, 2013 at 11:02

Lennart Regebro · Accepted Answer · 2013-09-17 11:05:48Z

1

"Want to post in %s?(Y/N)" is not Unicode.

Prefix it with a u:

u"Want to post in %s?(Y/N)" % i['name']

However, raw_input() doesn't like having Unicode text as the prompt. So you need to encode it with the encoding that your standard out uses.

prompt = u"Want to post in %s?(Y/N) " % i['name']
check = raw_input(prompt.encode(sys.stdout.encoding))

answered Sep 17, 2013 at 10:32

Lennart Regebro

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3 Comments

I got the error UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 16-24: ordinal not in range(128)

@Stormvirux: Aha. Then the strings in the i dictionary is also not Unicode, so you are in fact not trying to print Unicode at all.

@Stormvirux: Absolutely not. You need to read up more about Unicode and encodings. Start here: regebro.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/… Then here: docs.python.org/2/howto/unicode.html