Accentuated characters not displaying well in Arcpy Toolbox in ArcMap

Question

Accentuated are not well displayed in my Toolbox made with ArcPy.

For instance :

def __init__(self):
    """Define the tool (tool name is the name of the class)."""
    self.label = "Sample éééé"

Produce the following output while executing from ArcMap :

Sample éééé

é become é

Answer 1

ArcMap uses the following encoding cp1252

In order to make accentuated characters well displayed in ArcMap UI.

First add the following import and set encoding to utf-8 at the beginning of your .pyt file.

import sys 
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

reload is needed because : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21393758/unicodedecodeerror-ascii-codec-cant-decode-byte-0xe5-in-position-0-ordinal

Then every string you display in the UI must be formated like this :

sampleString = "éééé"    
sampleString.encode('cp1252') #output : éééé