python - How can I display native accents to languages in console in windows?

Question

print "Espa?ol
Português
Italiano".encode('utf-8')

Errors:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in print "Espa?ol Português Italiano".encode('utf-8') UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xf1 in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)

I'm trying to make a multilingual console program in Windows. Is this possible? I've saved the file in utf-8 encoding as well, I get the same error.

*EDIT I"m just outputting text in this program. I change to lucida fonts, I keep getting this: alt text http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/7312/foreignlangwindowsconso.png

I'm just looking for a portable way to correctly display foreign languages in the console in windows. If it can do it cross platform, even better. I thought utf-8 was the answer, but all of you are telling me fonts, etc.. also plays a part. So anyone have a definitive answer?

Answer 1

Short answer:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
print u"Espa?ol
Português
Italiano".encode('utf-8')

The first line tells Python that your file is encoded in UTF-8 (your editor must use the same settings) and this line should always be on the beginning of your file.

Another thing is that Python 2 knows two different basestring objects - str and unicode. The u prefix will create such a unicode object instead of the default str object, which you can then encode as UTF-8 (but printing unicode objects directly should also work).