Setting default encoding to UTF-8 in Python

After a long struggle for fixing up an error thrown by my Python script, I finally figured out an easy way to do it.

As we know, Python's default encoding is ASCII (0-127), anything beyond that , Non-ASCII characters throws UnicodeEncode exception. To fix it up, we need to use UTF-8 encoding, which suits most of the characters.

The easiest way to do that is:

Go to your Python setup directory and then go to lib: C:\Python27\lib

Look for site.py file, used for site specific configuration

Edit it: Go to 'setencoding()' function and change the line: encoding = "ascii" to encoding = "utf-8"

That's it!

I don't know other implications of editing it right in site.py file but it worked for me, and I found it the easiest way to change the encoding!

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Nilesh Kumar

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