What should I do when sys.stdout.encoding is None?

Question

I am trying to handle the different encodings in a Python script the more user-friendly and auto-magic way possible (there are APIs for utf8). It is a cross-platform console script.

For printing to stdout I use sys.stdout.encoding and it seems to do the right thing almost always when printing to the console. However when stdout is piped it becomes None.

So in that case I assume I am piping to a file and use locale.getpreferredencoding() but:

• I am not sure this is the right encoding for printing to a file, but it works quite cross-platform.
• That doesn't work when piping to a program |. I don't know how to detect that this is the case neither if there is a standard or an expected behavior for encoding in that case.

Answer 1

If it is None, simply output your data as utf-8, and document it. If it happens that there are use cases for other encodings, make that an option through the command line or other means.