Python 3 character encoding issue

Question

i am selecting values from a MySQL // Maria DB that contains latin1 charset with latin1_swedish_ci collation. There are possible characters from different European language as Spanish ñ, German ä or Norwegian ø.

I get the data with

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# coding: utf-8

...
sql.execute("SELECT name FROM myTab")
for row in sql
 print(row[0])

There is an error message: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xf1' Okay I have changed my print to

print(str(row[0].encode('utf8')))

and the result looks like this: b'\xc3\xb1' i looked at this Working with utf-8 encoding in Python source but i have declard the header. Also decode('utf8').encode('cp1250') does not help

Answer 1

okay the encoding issue has been solved finaly. Coldspeed gave a important hind with loacle. therefore all kudos for him! Unfortunately it was not that easy.

I found a workaround that fix the problem.

import sys
sys.stdout = open(sys.stdout.fileno(), mode='w', encoding='utf8', buffering=1)

The solution is from Jack O'Connor. posted in this answer:

Answer 2

Python3 tries to automatically decode this string based on your locale settings. If your locale doesn't match up with the encoding on the string, you get garbled text, or it doesn't work at all. You can forcibly try encoding it with your locale and then decoding to cp1252 (it seems this is the encoding on the string).

print(row[0].encode('latin-1').decode('cp1252'))