More Python character encoding braindamage

[ewx]

rjk@rackheath:~$ python -c 'print "møøse"'
møøse
rjk@rackheath:~$ python -c 'print u"møøse"'
møøse
rjk@rackheath:~$ locale
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
rjk@rackheath:~$ python -V
Python 2.5.2

(...but it's the same in 2.6.x.)

I think it's interpreting each byte in the (actually UTF-8¹) input string as a Unicode code point in its own right, though another (philosophically different but pragmatically essentially identical) possibility is that it thinks all input strings are encoded using ISO-8859-1.

¹ and don't give me the nonsense someone came up with last time about Python having no way to know how the input is encoded. It does have a way, that's what LC_CTYPE is for.