I know that python is very funny WRT unicode processing, but this defies all my knowledge.

I use the es_ES.UTF-8 encoding on linux. The script:


python -c "print unicode('á %s' % 'éí','utf8') " works, i.e., prints á éí in the next line.

However, if I redirect it to less or to a file, like

python -c "print unicode('á %s' % 'éí','utf8') " >test
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in ?
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)


Why is the behaviour different when stdout is redirected? How can I get it to do "the right thing" in both cases?