title: Why can't I display a unicode character in the Python Interpreter on Mac OS X Terminal.app?
body: <p>If I try to paste a unicode character such as the middle dot: </p>
  
  <p>·</p>
  
  <p>in my python interpreter it does nothing. I'm using Terminal.app on Mac OS X and when I'm simply in in bash I have no trouble:</p>
  
  <pre><code>:~$ ·
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But in the interpreter:</p>
  
  <pre><code>:~$ python
  Python 2.6.1 (r261:67515, Feb 11 2010, 00:51:29) 
  [GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)] on darwin
  Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
  &gt;&gt;&gt; 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>^^ I get nothing, it just ignores that I just pasted the character. If I use the escape \xNN\xNN representation of the middle dot '\xc2\xb7', and try to convert to unicode, trying to show the dot causes the interpreter to throw an error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; unicode('\xc2\xb7')
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "&lt;stdin&gt;", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I have setup 'utf-8' as my default encoding in sitecustomize.py so:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; sys.getdefaultencoding()
  'utf-8'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What gives? It's not the Terminal. It's not Python, what am I doing wrong?!</p>
  
  <p>This question is not related to this <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/918294/python-unicode-in-mac-os-x-terminal">question</a>, as that indivdiual is able to paste unicode into his Terminal.</p>