Vscode: Python print unicode generate error in output window

[sun1991]

• VSCode Version:1.1
• OS Version:Win7 64bit, Python 2.7.8

Steps to Reproduce:
Source:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

unicode_name = u'上海'
utf8_name = unicode_name.encode('utf-8')

print(utf8_name)
print(unicode_name) # This line generate error

Output:
上海
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "d:\Temp\tmp2.py", line 7, in
print(unicode_name) # This line generate error
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-1: ordinal not in range(128)

[isidorn]

@bpasero do you think this is the issue with our output decoding or the editor?

[bpasero]

This sounds like an error in his python program???

[isidorn]

@sun1991 Do you get the same error if you run your python program outside of vscode?

[sun1991]

@isidorn Tried the same code in IDLE, no error happen. The way IDLE treated it is:

print(utf8_name) -> output utf-8 bytes interpreted by local non-unicode setting, althrough not useful (not human readable)
print(unicode_name) -> output correct characters, because it is unicode after all...

I think the way IDLE handle makes more sense. After all, for python 2.7, utf8_name is just byte array, if encoding is not know, then it is just some bytes. But unicode_name is... unicode code point, so it should always precisely know what its representation should be.

But VS Code output window did reverse, looks like it interpreted bytes as utf-8 bytes, but report error on unicode.

[isidorn]

@sun1991 thanks for providing additional information. What happens when you execute your pything script in the command prompt?

[sun1991]

@isidorn This is what looks like in console, the output is the same from what on IDLE.

C:\Users\abc>python
Python 2.7.8 (default, Jun 30 2014, 16:03:49) [MSC v.1500 32 bit (Intel)] on win
32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> unicode_name = u'上海'
>>> utf8_name = unicode_name.encode('utf-8')
>>> print(utf8_name)
涓婃捣
>>> print(unicode_name)
上海

[ghost]

win8.1/ VSC1.1/python3.5 - bug is reproduced
IDLE - all correct
But VSC is not IDE or сompiler, what are extension for python debugging you use?
Bug perhaps between VSC & extension or extension & python, _if first - MS, we need solve :)_
If you use ext by Don Jayamanne, he is having not closed issue about that [iss#102]

[DonJayamanne]

Hi, I have updated the original issue #102 with some additional information. I believe this is a problem lies with how the default encoding is picked up by Python when launched from NodeJs.

[DonJayamanne]

I'm closing this issue as this was an issue with the Python extension itself and the issue has now been resolved #102.
If the issue still persists, please re-open the issue in Python repo

[kyleduo]

Same problem in version 0.5.2, these following code cause the save error:

print('中文')

The default output encoding is "ASCII" while the program needs "Unicode". So I have to add these line to make it work correctly.

import sys
import io

sys.stdout = io.TextIOWrapper(sys.stdout.buffer, encoding='utf8')

print('中文')

How can I change the default output encoding of VSCode runtime to utf-8 or is there an other solution?

[kyleduo]

Finally I found this page witch solved my problem. https://segmentfault.com/a/1190000005986197

Edit tasks.json like this.

{
    "version": "0.1.0",
    "command": "python",
    "isShellCommand": true,
    "args": ["${file}"],
    "showOutput": "always",
    "options": {
        "env": {
            "PYTHONIOENCODING": "UTF-8"
        }
    }
}