unicode printing

gistfile1.txt

## test.py

key = u"things"
val = u"幾內亞比索"

print u"%s: %s" % (key, val)

## test2.py

from contextlib import closing

key = u"things"
val = u"幾內亞比索"

with closing(open("test.txt", "w")) as f:
    # throws UnicodeEncodeError
    f.write(u"%s: %s" % (key, val))

##

james:~/tmp% python test.py
things: 幾內亞比索

james:~/tmp% python test.py > test.txt
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test.py", line 8, in <module>
    print "%s: %s" % (key, unicode(val))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 8-12: ordinal not in range(128)