Printing characters that are not in ASCII 0-127 (Python 3)

Question

So, I've got an algorithm whereby I take a character, take its character code, increase that code by a variable, and then print that new character. However, I'd also like it to work for characters not in the default ASCII table. Currently it's not printing 'special' characters like € (for example). How can I make it print certain special characters?

#!/usr/bin/python3
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

def generateKey(name):

    i = 0
    result = ""

    for char in name:

        newOrd = ord(char) + i
        newChar = chr(newOrd)
        print(newChar)

        result += newChar

        i += 1

    print("Serial key for name: ", result)

generateKey(input("Enter name: "))

Whenever I give an input that forces special characters (like |||||), it works fine for the first four characters (including DEL where it gives the transparent rectangle icon), but the fifth character (meant to be €) is also an error char, which is not what I want. How can I fix this?

Here's the output from |||||:

Enter name: |||||
|
}
~


Serial key for name:  |}~

But the last char should be €, not a blank. (BTW the fourth char, DEL, becomes a transparent rectangle when I copy it into Windows)

Answer 1

In the default encoding (utf-8), chr(128) is not the euro symbol. It's a control character. See this Unicode table. So indeed it should be blank, not €.

You can verify the default encoding with sys.getdefaultencoding().

If you want to reinterpret chr(128) as the euro symbol, you should use the windows-1252 encoding. There, it is indeed the euro symbol. (Different encodings disagree on how to represent values beyond ASCII's 0–127.)