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From: Peter Otten <__peter__@web.de>
Subject: Re: right adjusted strings containing umlauts
Date: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 18:34:51 +0200
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Kurt Mueller wrote:

> Am 08.08.2013 17:44, schrieb Peter Otten:
>> Kurt Mueller wrote:
>>> What do I do, when input_strings/output_list has other codings like
>>> iso-8859-1?
>> 
>> You have to know the actual encoding. With that information it's easy:
>>>>> output_list
>> ['\xc3\xb6', '\xc3\xbc', 'i', 's', 'f']
>>>>> encoding = "utf-8"
>>>>> output_list = [s.decode(encoding) for s in output_list]
>>>>> print output_list
>> [u'\xf6', u'\xfc', u'i', u's', u'f']
> 
> How do I get to know the actual encoding?
> I read from stdin. There can be different encondings.
> Usually utf8 but also iso-8859-1/latin9 are to be expected.
> But sys.stdin.encoding sais always 'None'.

Even with

$ cat funny_pic.jpg | ./mypythonscript.py

you could "successfully" (i. e. no errors) decode stdin using iso-8859-1.
So unfortunately you have to guess. 

A simple strategy is to try utf-8 and fall back to iso-8859-1 if that fails 
with a UnicodeDecodeError. There's also

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/chardet