Unable to print unicode characters due to incorrect locale

[Former user]

grabber.py is crashing with the following error message when listing the available programs. Doesn't occur for all programming listings.

Sequence performed on 6/aug/15

Run grabber.py

Select Station: SBS (3) Select Channel: SBS1 (2)

Crash occurs during program listing

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./grabber.py", line 61, in <module>
    main()
  File "./grabber.py", line 46, in main
    result = choose(options, allow_multi=will_download)
  File "./grabber.py", line 15, in choose
    print("%3d) %s" % (i+1, key))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2018' in position 45: ordinal not in range(128)

[delx]

I can't reproduce this with Python2 or Python3. What version of Python are you running?

What's the output of running the command locale? You should be using UTF-8.

I can only reproduce this if I set LC_CTYPE=C.

[Former user]

I am a using OS X 10.8

Slim:webdl tom$ which python
/usr/bin/python
Slim:webdl tom$ python --version
Python 2.7.2
Slim:webdl tom$ locale
LANG=
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL=
Slim:webdl tom$ uname
Darwin

Looks like the problem is the Locale is not UTF-8 or LC_CTYPE=C might be the problem?

Any idea how to you change it?

[delx]

I don't use Mac OSX, but a quick Google search suggests you may be able to configure this in Terminal.app Preferences.

Worst case you can just put export LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 or equivalent into your shell configuration.

[Former user]

The fix is to add the following lines to your .bash_profile file :

# Setting for the new UTF-8 terminal support in Lion
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Solution found here:

https://yzisin.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/how-to-fix-locale-issues-in-mac-os-x-lion-terminal/

[delx]

Issue #25 was marked as a duplicate of this issue.