Richard Kettlewell

I can see some merit in the argument that the source file should specify its own encoding, because if I write my source file in ISO-8859-1 it shouldn't break when I send it to you just because you have LANG=en_GB.UTF-8.

But that doesn't really explain this:

$ LANG=en_GB.ISO8859-1 python -c 'print u"møøse"'
møøse
$ LANG=POSIX python -c 'print u"møøse"'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 1-2:
ordinal not in range(128)