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A common problem encountered when using python3 is writing non-ascii to stdout. This will work fine if stdout is a terminal and the terminal encoding handles the characters, but will fail if stdout is later redirected to a pipe. The docs for sys.stdout and for print should contain or point to an explanation of why, and how to solve the problem (ie: how to set the encoding for sys.stdout/sys.stderr).
Note that IMO it makes more sense for sys.stdout to default to the LOCALE encoding, but that should be a separate issue.

Victor says it defaults to LOCALE in 3.3. The documentation should still be expanded to mention this even in 3.3, though.

Ah, this was actually fixed in 3.2, so it is only 2.7 where there is the different (and long standing) problem of output of unicode to a pipe.
So, the doc issue boils down to mentioning how the encoding for stdout/stderr is derived (LOCALE, overridden by PYTHONIOENCODING if set, as far as I can tell).

I'm not sure if this is good documentation, but it explains how the encoding is gotten for stdout and stderr.

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I've reworded the patch and fixed the issues in the patch pointed out by eric.araujo.

Thanks. Here’s another take: I think the wording is better, but it’s longer. I removed the reference to sys.stdin, which you don’t print to: I haven’t checked if the doc for the input function should talk about the encoding too.