It seems like all answers so far are from Unix people who assume the Windows console is like a Unix terminal, which it is not.
The problem is that you can't write Unicode output to the Windows console using the normal underlying file I/O functions. The Windows API WriteConsole needs to be used. Python should probably be doing this transparently, but it isn't.
There's a different problem if you redirect the output to a file: Windows text files are historically in the ANSI codepage, not Unicode. You can fairly safely write UTF-8 to text files in Windows these days, but Python doesn't do that by default.
I think it should do these things, but here's some code to make it happen. You don't have to worry about the details if you don't want to; just call ConsoleFile.wrap_standard_handles(). You do need PyWin installed to get access to the necessary APIs.
import os, sys, io, win32api, win32console, pywintypes def change_file_encoding(f, encoding): """ TextIOWrapper is missing a way to change the file encoding, so we have to do it by creating a new one. """ errors = f.errors line_buffering = f.line_buffering # f.newlines is not the same as the newline parameter to TextIOWrapper. # newlines = f.newlines buf = f.detach() # TextIOWrapper defaults newline to \r\n on Windows, even though the underlying # file object is already doing that for us. We need to explicitly say "\n" to # make sure we don't output \r\r\n; this is the same as the internal function # create_stdio. return io.TextIOWrapper(buf, encoding, errors, "\n", line_buffering) class ConsoleFile: class FileNotConsole(Exception): pass def __init__(self, handle): handle = win32api.GetStdHandle(handle) self.screen = win32console.PyConsoleScreenBufferType(handle) try: self.screen.GetConsoleMode() except pywintypes.error as e: raise ConsoleFile.FileNotConsole def write(self, s): self.screen.WriteConsole(s) def close(self): pass def flush(self): pass def isatty(self): return True @staticmethod def wrap_standard_handles(): sys.stdout.flush() try: # There seems to be no binding for _get_osfhandle. sys.stdout = ConsoleFile(win32api.STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE) except ConsoleFile.FileNotConsole: sys.stdout = change_file_encoding(sys.stdout, "utf-8") sys.stderr.flush() try: sys.stderr = ConsoleFile(win32api.STD_ERROR_HANDLE) except ConsoleFile.FileNotConsole: sys.stderr = change_file_encoding(sys.stderr, "utf-8") ConsoleFile.wrap_standard_handles() print("English 漢字 Кири́ллица")
This is a little tricky: if stdout or stderr is the console, we need to output with WriteConsole; but if it's not (eg. foo.py > file), that's not going to work, and we need to change the file's encoding to UTF-8 instead.
The opposite in either case will not work. You can't output to a regular file with WriteConsole (it's not actually a byte API, but a UTF-16 one; PyWin hides this detail), and you can't write UTF-8 to a Windows console.
Also, it really should be using _get_osfhandle to get the handle to stdout and stderr, rather than assuming they're assigned to the standard handles, but that API doesn't seem to have any PyWin binding.
