How To Print National Characters In List Representation?

I'm writing JSON data with special characters (å, ä, ö) to file and then reading it back in. Then I use this data in a subprocess command. When using the read data I cannot make

Solution 1:

This is the canonical representation of string constants in Python which is designed to eliminate encoding issues. Actually, it's what repr() on a string returns. List's str() function implementation that is called when it's printed calls repr() on its members to represent them.

The only way to output a string with non-ASCII characters as they are is to print it or otherwise write it to a stream. See Why does Python print unicode characters when the default encoding is ASCII? on how character conversion is done on printing. Also note that for non-ASCII 8-bit characters, the output will be different for terminals set up for different codepages.

Regarding the solution:

The simplest one will be to make an alternative str(list) implementation that will call str() instead of repr() - noting the warnings above.

def list_nativechars(l):
  assert isinstance(l,list)
  return "[" + ", ".join('"'+str(i)+'"' for i in l) + "]"

Now (in cp866 console encoding):

>>> l=["йцукен"]
>>> print list_nativechars(l)
["йцукен"]

With data in foreign encoding:

# encoding: cp858
<...>
l= ['cmd.exe', '-Name=Mötley', '-Bike=Härley', '-Chef=Börk']
print list_nativechars(l)

c:\>python t.py
["cmd.exe", "-Name=MФtley", "-Bike=HДrley", "-Chef=BФrk"]