Cannot print Circuit ascii diagram

Hi,

I created a basic circuit and tried to print it to console. It hit me with the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 3-5: ordinal not
in range(128)

My code is as follows:

import cirq

# Build a model using Circuits
circuit = cirq.Circuit()

# Create Qubits
(q0, q1) = cirq.LineQubit.range(2)

# Add Qubits to Circuit model using logic gates
circuit.append([cirq.H(q0), cirq.CNOT(q0, q1)])

# Measure the final values of the Qubits
circuit.append([cirq.measure(q0), cirq.measure(q1)])

# Visualising the Circuit
print (circuit)

Can someone tell me how I can fix this and visualise my circuit? Thanks!

[Strilanc]

This is likely a problem with your python environment’s configuration, e.g. the default text encoding is not set to UTF8.

Are you on a windows machine? Are you using python 2 or python 3? If you try print(circuit.to_text_diagram(use_unicode_characters=False)) does that work as a workaround?

[sloveys]

We could have a global switch to set it, like an equivalent of np.printoptions, but I dislike that kind of configuration because it’s so easy for code in one file to break code in a file somewhere else.

That’s why you set global switches in a if __name__ == "__main__": block to prevented from changing setting if that file is later imported. But ya, it would be so much easier if standards where… standard.

Edit: I’ve updated python from 3.5 to 3.7 and that fixed the problem for me. I heard updating to 3.6 also works but I haven’t checked myself.