How to display utf-8 in windows console

I'm using Python 2.6 on Windows 7

I borrowed some code from here: Python, Unicode, and the Windows console

My goal is to be able to display uft-8 strings in the windows console.

Apparantly in python 2.6, the

sys.setdefaultencoding()

is no longer supported

However, I wrote reload(sys) before I tried to use it and it magically didn't error.

This code will NOT error, but it shows funny characters instead of japanese text. I believe the problem is because I have not successfully changed the codepage of the windows console.

These are my attempts, but they don't work:

reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')

print os.popen('chcp 65001').read()

sys.stdout.encoding = 'cp65001'

Perhaps you can use win32console to change the codepage? I tried the code from the website I linked, but it also errored from the win32console.. maybe that code is obsolete.

Here's my code, that doesn't error but prints funny characters:

#coding=<utf8>
import os
import sys
import codecs



reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf8')(sys.stdout)
sys.stderr = codecs.getwriter('utf8')(sys.stderr)

#print os.popen('chcp 65001').read()
print(sys.stdout.encoding)
sys.stdout.encoding = 'cp65001'
print(sys.stdout.encoding)

x = raw_input('press enter to continue')

a = 'こんにちは世界'#.decode('utf8')
print a

x = raw_input()