Ron Garret wrote:
Is there a way to change the default string encoding used by the
string.encode() method?
encode() or decode()? Encoding is best handled by the output stream, e. g.
passing codecs.open(...) instead of the builtin open(...).
My default environment is utf-8 but I need it
to be latin-1 to avoid errors like this:
>>>'Andr\xe9 Ramel'.decode()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe9 in position 4:
ordinal not in range(128)
If your environment were latin-1, you'd get the same error because Python
assumes ascii by default.
I can't change the code to pass an encoding argument to the decode
method because it's someone else's code.
Does that code accept unicode strings? Try to pass u"Andre\xe9 Ramel"
instead of the byte string.
If all else fails there's
>>sys.setdefaultencoding("latin1")
"Andre\xe9 Ramel".decode()
u'Andre\xe9 Ramel'
but that's an evil hack, you should rather talk to the maintainer of the
offending code to update it to accept unicode.
Peter
