I am trying to print ascii art like this:
print(("""\
._ o o
\_`-)|_
,"" \
," ## | ಠ ಠ.
," ## ,-\__ `.
," / `--._;)
," ## /
," ## /
""").encode('utf-8'))
And the output does not look right at all.
What is the proper method of printing ascii art?
encode takes a string and encodes it into bytes. That's not what you want here; you want to just print the string directly:
print("""\
._ o o
\_`-)|_
,"" \
," ## | ಠ ಠ.
," ## ,-\__ `.
," / `--._;)
," ## /
," ## /
""")
If this doesn't work, your terminal is most likely not configured to display Unicode. Unfortunately, I am not particularly knowledgeable about terminal configuration; Why doesn't my terminal output unicode characters properly? may be relevant, but my ability to help is mostly limited to the Python side of things.