Can I redirect unicode output from the console directly into a file?

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When printing to the console, Python looks at sys.stdout.encoding to determine the encoding to use to encode unicode objects before printing.

When redirecting output to a file, sys.stdout.encoding is None, so Python2 defaults to the ascii encoding. (In contrast, Python3 defaults to utf-8.) This often leads to an exception when printing unicode.

You can avoid the error by explicitly encoding the unicode yourself before printing:

print (unicode_obj.encode('utf-8'))

or you could redefine sys.stdout so all output is encoded in utf-8:

import sys
import codecs
sys.stdout=codecs.getwriter('utf-8')(sys.stdout)
print(unicode_obj)

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