I am not able to print Arabic characters to the terminal in vscode

Question

I am trying to get what a person says in Arabic and then print that to the terminal. When I try to speak to the mic, any Arabic word I say gets printed as ???? with the number of question marks depending on the number of letters of what I said. I added the print(get_display(arabic_reshaper.reshape("مرحبا"))) to see if I can print Arabic characters in general and this is what shows in my terminal:

Listening...

Error: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters in position 0-4: character maps to <undefined>

Say that again...

I have already set my settings of the text editor to be of UTF-8. This is my code:

import speech_recognition as sr
import arabic_reshaper
import sys
from bidi.algorithm import get_display

def command():
    r = sr.Recognizer()
    with sr.Microphone() as source:
        print("Listening...")
        r.pause_threshold = 0.6
        audio = r.listen(source)

        try:
            print(get_display(arabic_reshaper.reshape("مرحبا")))
            ask = r.recognize_google(audio, language='ar-SA')
            reshaped_ask = arabic_reshaper.reshape(ask)
            bidi_text = get_display(reshaped_ask)
            try:
                if sys.stdout.encoding.lower() == 'utf-8':
                    print(bidi_text)
                else:
                    print(bidi_text.encode(sys.stdout.encoding, errors='replace').decode(sys.stdout.encoding))
            except UnicodeEncodeError:
                print(bidi_text.encode(sys.stdout.encoding, errors='replace').decode(sys.stdout.encoding))
        except Exception as e:
            print("Error:", str(e))
            print("Say that again...")
            return ""

        return ask

command()

When I try to run the following code:

 reshaped_text = arabic_reshaper.reshape("مرحبا")
 bidi_text = get_display(reshaped_text)
 print(bidi_text)

I get مرحبا printed from left to right and not right to left.

Answer 1

It doesn't work because your terminal don't support it. We can print those characters but they appear disjointly. To work with Arabic letters, I will suggest you to use python-eel or python-electron. These packages allow you to use html, css and js for front end of a GUI application so you can display the Arabic letters.