Problems with decoding from command prompt [python]

I have the following problem. I have a german text saved in .txt UTF-8 format, and I’d like to print it out with python. Here’s my code:

txt = open(filename, 'r').read()
print txt.decode('utf-8-sig')

It works perfectly in IDLE, but when I save my code and run it from the command prompt, it raises error, specifically:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode characters in position 3-4: cha
racter maps to <undefined>

In my particular case, the text is “gemäßigt”, and in the beginning of .py code I put something like

# -*- coding: utf-8-sig -*-

By the way, my OS is Windows, in Russian. Does anybody have an idea what is my problem?

Best, Alex

Answer

Your console uses the DOS codepage 866 which doesn’t have the character symbols for ä or ß, causing the error.

You could try .encoding('cp866', errors='replace') your string before output, replacing all the characters not supported by your terminal by ?s.