How to print greek letters in Python (version 2.6)

Question

I have the following script however when the clipboard contents are greek letters it fails to print them right.
I have used all posible encoding for greek letters including utf8 but to no avail so i just stay with latin1.

Can you suggest a solution?

Here is the script:

import win32clipboard
win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
data = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData()
win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
data = data.decode('latin1')
send = 'ccc|=:='+data
print data
print send 

Answer 1

That cannot possibly work, since there are no Greek letters in Latin1. If you run this piece of code, you will see no Greek letters except for µ MICRO SIGN.

import unicodedata
for i in range(256):
 c = chr(i).decode('latin-1')
 print c, unicodedata.name(c, "")

I'm not an expert on Windows, but my guess is that the data coming out of the clipboard could be using one of these encodings:

ISO-8859-7 # The code page used by some Greek versions of Windows.
UTF-16be
UTF-16
UTF-8

I'd try ISO-8859-7 and UTF-16be first, like this:

import win32clipboard
win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
data = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData()
win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
data = data.decode('UTF-16BE')

Answer 2

You need to know what encoding is actually being used. Attempting to decode using arbitrary encodings is doomed to failure. Possibly Windows is using some kind of global default encoding, or possibly you
can query the other program for its encoding, but you're unlikely to succeed by pointing the decode gun in random directions and firing.

Incidentally, you may find things easier if you switch to Python 3.3 - quite a bit of Unicode handling is improved in Py3.