Print an arabic unicode string in Python(x,y)

Question

I have an Arabic unicode string that I want to print in Python (using Python(x,y) on Windows 7), but I can't get it to print, only the unicode representation is printed out.

The string is defined as:

ss = u'\u0647\u0630\u0627 \u0647\u0648 \u0627\u0644\u062d\u0644 \u0627\u0644\u0648\u062d\u064a\u062f \u0644\u0644\u0645\u0634\u0643\u0644\u0629 \u0627\u0644\u062a\u064a \u0646\u0648\u0627\u062c\u0647\u0647\u0627'

and should look like this: "هذا هو الحل الوحيد للمشكلة التي نواجهها"

When I try print, it gives the following error

print ss
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 12, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_table)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters in position 0-2: character maps to <undefined>

When I encode the string, say with cp1256 (Windows Arabic), it gives a wrong representation:

print ss.encode('cp1256')
åÐÇ åæ ÇáÍá ÇáæÍíÏ ááãÔßáÉ ÇáÊí äæÇÌååÇ

I have looked at several questions here related to printing unicode from Python on Windows, but nothing seems to work.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

UPDATE: I am using Spyder IDE (bundled with Python(x,y) on Windows 7).

UPDATE2: I already tried all the solutions in the "duplicate" questions, but none worked.

@ecatmur I tried the solutions on that page, and none worked — Mohamed Aly, Mar 01 '13 at 16:46
check [this](http://stackoverflow.com/q/39528462/5284370) out. — Soorena, Sep 18 '16 at 13:20

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 01 '13 at 16:36

1

Your console is configured to display codepage 1252 (Latin 1), which indeed cannot handle your codepoints. Switch your console to a different codepage that can display the characters.

You could switch to 1256:

chcp 1256

or switch to 65001 (the UTF-8 codepage), which should be able to handle any unicode codepoint. You may have to switch the font used for your console though; Lucida Sans is reported to display most of Unicode.

answered Mar 01 '13 at 16:36

Martijn Pieters

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switching to chcp 1256 didn't solve the problem, still get unreadable/wrong characters. Switching to 65001 gives an error in the python interpreter: LookupError: unknown encoding: cp65001 – Mohamed Aly Mar 01 '13 at 16:43
@malaa: What python version do you use? – Martijn Pieters Mar 01 '13 at 16:48
@malaa: See [Windows cmd encoding change causes Python crash](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/878972/3259271) – Martijn Pieters Mar 01 '13 at 16:49
@malaa: Since I don't use windows myself, it is harder for me to discern what versions support the 65001 codepage. Does the linked message help? – Martijn Pieters Mar 01 '13 at 17:00
no, tried the solutions there and none worked. thanks :) – Mohamed Aly Mar 01 '13 at 17:07
@malaa: The [answer](http://stackoverflow.com/a/3259271/100297) that describes how to alias 65001 to UTF-8? – Martijn Pieters Mar 01 '13 at 17:11
Tried that also, but didn't work – Mohamed Aly Mar 01 '13 at 18:10
See https://github.com/Drekin/win-unicode-console. It's a package solving the problem. You can also read the explanation of the problem. The package is also on pypi (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/win_unicode_console) and can be installed using pip. – user87690 Apr 09 '15 at 16:11

Print an arabic unicode string in Python(x,y)

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