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pythonutf-8nohup

python print statement with utf-8 and nohup

I have a some python code that prints log messages. When run at the command line, it does fine with utf-8. Log messages that contain special characters print out fine. However, when run in the background under nohup, it barfs on utf-8 characters.

nohup python2.7 myProgram.py &

The error I see is the usual "try to encode utf in ascii" error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in position 71: ordinal not in range(128)

I assume this is because nohup signals to python that it doesn't have a normal terminal, so it defaults to ascii. Is there any way to either tell nohup to run with utf-8 enabled or to set this up so that utf-8 characters won't cause a crash when running under nohup in the background?

Solution

  • Use PYTHONIOENCODING:

    export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8
nohup python2.7 myProgram.py &

    For example, if

    myProgram.py:

    unicode_obj=u'\N{INFINITY}'
print(unicode_obj)

    then running

    nohup python2.7 myProgram.py > /tmp/test &

    produces

    /tmp/test:

    UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u221e' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

    while

    export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8
nohup python2.7 myProgram.py > /tmp/test &

    produces

    /tmp/test:

    ∞