Member Avatar for gunbuster363

Hi all,
I am having problem printing chinese character in a text file.

Some point to know:
1. I do not know the codec of the text file, but I know it is writting in traditional chinese.
2. I tried some approach from google, no one work

I don't remember printing chinese character is so damn hard.......
Looking forwards to any help. Thanks

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by richieking

Dani AI

Generated

Building on 's pointer to Unicode basics and 's note about locales, here is a compact troubleshooting checklist and a small workflow to handle an unknown-encoding Traditional Chinese file (for and others landing here later).

Common failure modes: the file bytes use Big5/CP950 (Traditional Chinese) or UTF-8/UTF-16 while the reader/writer uses a different codec; the terminal/editor cannot render the characters even when the file is correct; automatic detectors can misguess on short samples. First check for a BOM (byte-order-mark) in the first bytes (EF BB BF = UTF-8 BOM, FF FE = UTF-16LE, FE FF = UTF-16BE). If no BOM, use an encoding detector and fall back to likely Traditional encodings (Big5/CP950 or Big5-HKSCS).

Example workflow (Python 3; requires the chardet package):

import chardet

with open('input.txt', 'rb') as f:
    raw = f.read()

enc = chardet.detect(raw).get('encoding') or 'utf-8'
text = raw.decode(enc, errors='replace')

with open('output-utf8.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    f.write(text)

For Python 2, decode the raw bytes and write with codecs.open(..., 'w', 'utf-8'). If chardet fails or guesses poorly, try big5, cp950, big5hkscs, or gb18030 explicitly. Prefer saving output as UTF-8 and opening it in a Unicode-aware editor. On Windows, the console often uses an OEM code page and may not display Chinese even when the file is correct; opening the file in Notepad++/Sublime/VSCode (explicit UTF-8) or switching the console code page can help.

Useful references: the chardet package for detection (chardet on PyPI) and the Unicode BOM FAQ (unicode.org BOM FAQ).

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Member Avatar for richieking

You must also have locales for chinese install on your system
;)

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