Working with encodings different from ASCII or UTF-8 has always been work which I don't like. It doesn't feel very constructive to just make Python read a file / print some output.
In the following, I will describe some strategies which might help you.
Test script
Copy the following text to a text file test.txt:
Die süße, kleine, lärmende Überfliegerin lebt in der Haute-Côte-Nord.
Dort hat es momentan 32°C.
On Debian-based systems you will get the information which type of encoding it has like this:
$ file test.txt
test.txt: UTF-8 Unicode text
This is probably the best result. But to make sure that we know how to deal with other encodings, you can change the encoding like this:
$ iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-1 test.txt > test-iso-8859-1.txt
$ file test-iso-8859-1.txt
test-iso-8859-1.txt: ISO-8859 text
Source code encoding
A first important step is to define the source code encoding. This is done with a comment. The first lines of Python code should probably always look like this:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
PEP-0263 explains it.
Printing encoding problems
The following error occurs when you try to print non-UTF-8 stuff with Python via Sublime Text:
[Decode error - output not utf-8]
The same code, executed via ZSH, gives:
Die s��e, kleine, l�rmende �berfliegerin lebt in der Haute-C�te-Nord.
Dort hat es momentan 32�C.
You can fix that by adjusting the code the following way:
#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
# Make it work with Python 2 and Python 3
import sys
PY3 = sys.version > "3"
if not PY3:
from future.builtins import open
# Specify the encoding while opening it
with open("test-iso-8859-1.txt", encoding="ISO-8859-1") as f:
content = f.read()
content = content.encode("UTF-8", "replace")
print(content)
The two important points are
- Specifying the encoding while opening the file
- Encoding the content with UTF-8
These two little steps helped me to deal with non-UTF-8 encodings.