Typing utf-8 characters in python in interactive mode on OS-X

Question

I am trying to type some spanish character into strings in interactive mode. For example, option+e e to produce 'é' so that I make a statement like string="él". This works in the terminal, but in python (any version I have installed, of which I have several) it doesn't. It simply produces nothing. This includes trying to paste in the characters. It's exactly the problem described in this question, specifically the part about pasting and in his comment to Alex's question, where he points out that Alex's answer doesn't address the question of the failure of copy/paste with regards to utf-8 characters. How can I do this?

Answer 1

The readline library that Python uses to read interactive input doesn't accept non-ASCII characters sent by the terminal. This means that either your terminal emulator doesn't provide the characters in the UTF-8 encoding, or readline is not configured to accept UTF-8 input.

Fortunately, readline is used by many popular programs, including the bash shell, so there is plenty of information how to get it working. For example, from this article:

How do I get UTF-8 input to work correctly?

• In the Terminal Inspector:
  • In the Emulation section, turn off the Escape non-ASCII characters option.
  • In the Display section, choose Unicode (UTF-8) as the Character Set Encoding.

• Add the following line to your .profile:

  export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
  

• Add the following lines to your .inputrc:

  set meta-flag on
  set input-meta on
  set output-meta on
  set convert-meta off 
  

• Apply changes by doing a source ~/.profile and a source ~/.inputrc.

Answer 2

use u before the string literal, to make it an unicode string.

string = u"El avión cayó del cielo"

if that's not working the problem lies in your editor or terminal, in that case try adding

#coding: utf8

in any of the first 2 lines of your python program and use a proper editor with unicode support.