Changing default encoding of Python?

Here is a simpler method (hack) that gives you back the setdefaultencoding() function that was deleted from sys:

import sys
# sys.setdefaultencoding() does not exist, here!
reload(sys)  # Reload does the trick!
sys.setdefaultencoding('UTF8')

(Note for Python 3.4+: reload() is in the importlib library.)

This is not a safe thing to do, though: this is obviously a hack, since sys.setdefaultencoding() is purposely removed from sys when Python starts. Reenabling it and changing the default encoding can break code that relies on ASCII being the default (this code can be third-party, which would generally make fixing it impossible or dangerous).

PS: This hack doesn't seem to work with Python 3.9 anymore.

If you get this error when you try to pipe/redirect output of your script

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-5: ordinal not in range(128)

Just export PYTHONIOENCODING in console and then run your code.

export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf8

A) To control sys.getdefaultencoding() output:

python -c 'import sys; print(sys.getdefaultencoding())'

ascii

Then

echo "import sys; sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-16-be')" > sitecustomize.py

and

PYTHONPATH=".:$PYTHONPATH" python -c 'import sys; print(sys.getdefaultencoding())'

utf-16-be

You could put your sitecustomize.py higher in your PYTHONPATH.

Also you might like to try reload(sys).setdefaultencoding by @EOL

B) To control stdin.encoding and stdout.encoding you want to set PYTHONIOENCODING:

python -c 'import sys; print(sys.stdin.encoding, sys.stdout.encoding)'

ascii ascii

Then

PYTHONIOENCODING="utf-16-be" python -c 'import sys; 
print(sys.stdin.encoding, sys.stdout.encoding)'

utf-16-be utf-16-be

Finally: you can use A) or B) or both!