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Python Encoding error with some unicode characers

I am having some problems with encoding some unicode characters. This is the code I am using:

test = raw_input("Test: ")
print test.encode("utf-8")

When I use now normal ASCII characters it works, same with some "strange" unicode characters like ☃. But when I use characters like ß ä ö ü § it fails creating this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "C:\###\Test.py", line 5, in <module>
 print test.encode("utf-8")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xdf in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Note that I am using a pc where German is the default language (so these characters are default characters).

Answer*

`raw_input()` returns a *byte string*. You don't need to encode that byte string, it is *already encoded*.

What happens instead then is that Python will first *decode* to get a `unicode` value to encode; you asked Python to encode so it'll damn well try to get you something that can be encoded. It is the decoding that fails here. Implicit decoding uses ASCII, which is why you got a `UnicodeDecodeError` exception (note the `Decode` in the name) for that codec.

If you wanted to produce a `unicode` object you'd have to explicitly decode. Use the codec Python has detected for `stdin`:

 import sys
 
 test = raw_input("Test: ")
 print test.decode(sys.stdin.encoding)

You don't need to do that *here* because you are printing, so writing right back to the same terminal which will use the same codec for input and output. Writing a byte string encoded with UTF-8 when you just received that byte string is then fine. Decoding to `unicode` is fine too, as printing will auto-encode to `sys.stdout.encoding`.

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Python Encoding error with some unicode characers

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