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Victor, thanks for replying and I've had a quick read of everything that went on for issue #1602. I think there's some misunderstanding in what I'm saying here. Maybe this will help clear up what I'm saying...
 D:\>chcp
 Active code page: 850
 D:\>chcp 65001
 Active code page: 65001
 D:\>python27\python
 Python 2.7 (r27:82525, Jul 4 2010, 09:01:59) [MSC v.1500 32 bit 
 (Intel)] on win32
 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> ^Z
 D:\>python31\python
 Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: can't initialize sys standard
 streams
 LookupError: unknown encoding: cp65001
 This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an
 unusual way.
 Please contact the application's support team for more information.
 D:\>chcp 850
 Active code page: 850
 D:\>python31\python
 Python 3.1.2 (r312:79149, Mar 21 2010, 00:41:52) [MSC v.1500 32 bit
 (Intel)] on win32
 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
 >>> ^Z
 D:\>
You see, I'm NOT trying to output any Unicode or UTF-8 characters. All I'm trying to do is run different versions of Python on the same machine from the command line.
Some code inside Python now "break" if Python 3.1 is started with Code Page 65001.
I fully understand the change between Python 2.7 and 3.1 were probably due to trying to fix issue #1602 (or some other related issue).
But, as a side-effect to that "fix", if you now start Python 3.1 (and maybe beyond) with code page set to 65001, it refuses to work but it didn't used to refuse to work.
Evidently, Python now tries using the Code Page as an encoding lookup. But, it didn't used to in 2.7. So, there's another compatability issue introduced.
Setting my cmd.exe code page to 65001 shouldn't mean a thing to Python if it can't associate it with an encoding. It could, at least, just switch to 7-Bit ASCII and proceed on. That would be better than failing!
That's my whole point. If Python want to do some tweeking with code pages to get it's job done, that's fine by me, as long as it doesn't "break" and restores whatever code page I had set when I started it.
It's not down to a UTF-8 issue, it's about a compatability issue introduced sometime in the last year or so as a side-effect of trying to resolve a UTF-8 issue, probably #1602.
That's all!