Python3: sys.stdout giving different results on linux and windows

Question

The output of code varies on Linux and Windows.I am not much familiar with encodings, which is what this problem seems to involve.

Here's my code:

import sys
from treelib import Tree
from io import StringIO

# creating and populating tree
tree = Tree()
tree.create_node("Harry", "harry")  # root node
tree.create_node("Jane", "jane", parent="harry")
tree.create_node("Bill", "bill", parent="harry")
tree.create_node("Diane", "diane", parent="jane")
tree.create_node("Mary", "mary", parent="diane")
tree.create_node("Mark", "mark", parent="jane")

# var to store standard output

output = StringIO()

sys.stdout = output

tree.show()
# restoring standard output to console
sys.stdout = sys.__stdout__

tree_structure = output.getvalue()

print(tree_structure)

I am getting expected output on Linux but on Windows result have chars encoded as \xNN.

Linux output:

Harry
├── Bill
└── Jane
    ├── Diane
    │   └── Mary
    └── Mark

Windows Output:

b'Harry\n\xe2\x94\x9c\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80 Bill\n\xe2\x94\x94\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80 Jane\n    \xe2\x94\x9c\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80 Diane\n    \xe2\x94\x82   \xe2\x94\x94\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80 Mary\n    \xe2\x94\x94\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80 Mark\n'

Though the result of sys.stdout.encoding was 'utf-8' both on windows and linux.

The closest I could reach to the expected output was by adding following before print statement:

#removing b'' from string
tree_structure = tree_structure[2:-2]
# converting to bytes
tree_structure = bytes(tree_structure,'utf-8')

tree_structure = tree_structure.decode('unicode_escape')

print(tree_structure)

output afterward:

Harry
âââ Bill
âââ Jane
    âââ Diane
    â   âââ Mary
    âââ Mark

Answer 1

This is most likely a problem with your Windows terminal and not with your code.

Try setting chcp 65001 in your console, which changes the code page to UTF-8. print("├") works for me after that.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490874.aspx

Answer 2

I was able to get the expected output by using codecs. This answer helped me. Using codec worked.

tree_structure = codecs.escape_decode(bytes(tree_structure, "utf-8"))[0].decode("utf-8")