title: How can I correctly show a Chinese string from calling raw_input() in Python?
body: <p>I was trying to conquer the Chinese encoding issue. So far the only obstacle before me is to show correctly the user typed in the <code>raw_input()</code>. For example, my abstract solution about this part is like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#coding: utf-8
  name_a = raw_input('请输入文字')
  print name_a
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But by this I can only show '请输入文字' correctly. If a user typed in a Chinese character in raw_input(), the print name_a will show utf-8 code point like '/xb7'</p>
  
  <p>Anyhow, I've searched online, and find this code can solve my problem:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#coding: utf-8
  
  n=raw_input(unicode('请输入文字','utf-8').encode('gbk'))
  print n 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It worked! But when I trying to plant it into my own code. My code can't be executed. And there was something even more weird happened. Later when I copy this code into other empty file, it can't work, too. Just a blink and the program was over (I know the feature of python under Windows environment so I added <code>x = input()</code> at the end of the file). And later I deleted the original test py file which contains the second code paragraph. Now I can't execute it in any new created file now.</p>
  
  <p>I'm using Python 2.7 under Windows XP environment </p>
  
  <p>What happened? </p>
  
  <p>And is there another way that can help me show the Chinese content the user typed into the <code>raw_input()</code>?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you very much.</p>