How can I correctly show a Chinese string from calling raw_input() in Python?

Question

I was trying to conquer the Chinese encoding issue. So far the only obstacle before me is to show correctly the user typed in the raw_input(). For example, my abstract solution about this part is like this:

#coding: utf-8
name_a = raw_input('请输入文字')
print name_a

But by this I can only show '请输入文字' correctly. If a user typed in a Chinese character in raw_input(), the print name_a will show utf-8 code point like '/xb7'

Anyhow, I've searched online, and find this code can solve my problem:

#coding: utf-8

n=raw_input(unicode('请输入文字','utf-8').encode('gbk'))
print n 

It worked! But when I trying to plant it into my own code. My code can't be executed. And there was something even more weird happened. Later when I copy this code into other empty file, it can't work, too. Just a blink and the program was over (I know the feature of python under Windows environment so I added x = input() at the end of the file). And later I deleted the original test py file which contains the second code paragraph. Now I can't execute it in any new created file now.

I'm using Python 2.7 under Windows XP environment

What happened?

And is there another way that can help me show the Chinese content the user typed into the raw_input()?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

This works for me:

x = raw_input(u'请输入文字'.encode("utf8"))

Also, I was successfully able to just print(x) and have it show the Chinese characters, so it's likely an OS (or terminal client) font rendering issue you are having.

Side note: NEVER use input() in Python 2.x. It implicitly evals all data the user enters (input() == eval(raw_input())), so something like __import__("os").system("rm -rf /*") would wipe the hard drive of the computer running the Python script.

Answer 2

Using this code:

#coding: utf-8

x = raw_input(u'请输入文字: '.encode("utf8"))
print "reprinting:",x

[out]:

$ python test.py
请输入文字: 123
reprinting: 123

So possibly it's not a python issue but an issue on your OS. If you get jumbled up outputs on the console, maybe it's font.

Answer 3

Try this:

#coding: utf-8
import sys

name_a = raw_input('请输入文字：'.encode(sys.stdout.encoding))
print name_a.decode(sys.stdout.encoding)
print name_a

Sample output:

请输入文字：中文字符
中文字符
中文字符

Answer 4

My script main.py

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import sys
reload(sys) 
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

name = raw_input("中文名字: ".encode(sys.stdout.encoding)) 
print name

or

name = raw_input("中文名字: ".encode(sys.stdin.encoding))

I invoke it use window pshell and (python 2.7.8)

python mian.py

then can display correctly:

中文名字: 中文名字测试
中文名字测试

May it helps someone.