BeautifulSoup error 'charmap' codec can't encode character

Question

This is the code I currently have

headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/49.0.2623.87 Safari/537.36'}
r = requests.get("http://www.google.com", headers=headers)
page_text = r.text
soup = BeautifulSoup(page_text, 'html.parser')
print(soup.prettify())

In theory it should send a request to google, get the text back and use beautifulsoup's method of prettify()

Here's their example code (from http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/#getting-help)

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(html_doc, 'html.parser')

print(soup.prettify())

Everytime I run this code I get the codec error. Here's a screenshot of the exact error

FOUND A SOLUTION

The solution is instead of using print() to use this print method from a stack exchange member.

def uprint(*objects, sep=' ', end='\n', file=sys.stdout):
    enc = file.encoding
    if enc == 'UTF-8':
        print(*objects, sep=sep, end=end, file=file)
    else:
        f = lambda obj: str(obj).encode(enc, errors='backslashreplace').decode(enc)
        print(*map(f, objects), sep=sep, end=end, file=file)

Answer 1

this happens when your terminal/powershell can't print out whatever character it's receiving from BeautifulSoup. two ways to fix it, first better than the second:

1. as referenced in PEP 0263, you can declare what encoding python should use by typing # coding=<encoding name> or # -*- coding: <encoding name> -*- where you would put the shebang line.

2. not the recommended method - at the beginning of your python script,

   import sys
   reload(sys)
   sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8') # or whichever one you want to use.
   

   this is the not recommended method because it's really kind of a misuse of the sys module, but works in a pinch if you are writing a program that isn't terribly complex.