For the past few days I've been learning programing with Python and I'm still but a beginner. Recently, I've used the book 'Code in the cloud' for that purpose. The thing is, while all those textbooks cover a wide area of topics thoroughly they merely touch upon the issue of UTF-8 encoding in languages other than English. Hance my question for you - how to make the following batch of code display utf-8 characters correctly in my mother tongue.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import datetime
import sys
class ChatError(Exception):
""" Wyjątki obsługujące wszelkiego rodzaju błędy w czacie."""
def __init__(self, msg):
 self.message = msg
# START: ChatMessage
class ChatMessage(object):
"""Pojedyncza wiadomość wysłana przez użytkownika czatu"""
def __init__(self, user, text):
 self.sender = user
 self.msg = text
 self.time = datetime.datetime.now()
def __str__(self):
 return "Od: %s o godzinie %s: %s" % (self.sender.username,
 self.time,
 self.msg)
# END: ChatMessage
# START: ChatUser
class ChatUser(object):
"""Użytkownik biorący udział w czacie"""
def __init__(self, username):
 self.username = username
 self.rooms = {}
def subscribe(self, roomname):
 if roomname in ChatRoom.rooms:
 room = ChatRoom.rooms[roomname]
 self.rooms[roomname] = room
 room.addSubscriber(self)
 else:
 raise ChatError("Nie znaleziono pokoju %s" % roomname)
def sendMessage(self, roomname, text):
 if roomname in self.rooms:
 room = self.rooms[roomname]
 cm = ChatMessage(self, text)
 room.addMessage(cm)
 else:
 raise ChatError("Użytkownik %s nie jest zarejestrowany w pokoju %s" % 
 (self.username, roomname))
def displayChat(self, roomname, out):
 if roomname in self.rooms:
 room = self.rooms[roomname]
 room.printMessages(out)
 else:
 raise ChatError("Użytkownik %s nie jest zarejestrowany w pokoju %s" % 
 (self.username, roomname))
# END: ChatUser
# START: ChatRoom
class ChatRoom(object):
"""A chatroom"""
rooms = {}
def __init__(self, name):
 self.name = name
 self.users = []
 self.messages = []
 ChatRoom.rooms[name] = self
def addSubscriber(self, subscriber):
 self.users.append(subscriber)
 subscriber.sendMessage(self.name, 'Użytkownik %s dołączył do dyskusji.' %
 subscriber.username)
def removeSubscriber(self, subscriber):
 if subscriber in self.users:
 subscriber.sendMessage(self.name, 
 "Użytkownik %s opóścił pokój." % 
 subscriber.username)
 self.users.remove(subscriber)
def addMessage(self, msg):
 self.messages.append(msg)
def printMessages(self, out):
 print >>out, "Lista wiadomości: %s" % self.name
 for i in self.messages:
 print >>out, i
# END: ChatRoom
# START: ChatMain
def main():
room = ChatRoom("Main") 
markcc = ChatUser("MarkCC")
markcc.subscribe("Main")
prag = ChatUser("Prag")
prag.subscribe("Main")
markcc.sendMessage("Main", "Hej! Jest tu kto?")
prag.sendMessage("Main", "Tak, ja tu jestem.")
markcc.displayChat("Main", sys.stdout)
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
# END: ChatMain

It was taken from the aforementioned book, but I cannot make it display non-English characters correctly in the Windows commandline (even though it supports them). As you can see I added encoding statement (# -- coding: utf-8 -) at the beginning thanks to which the code works at all. I also tried using u"string" syntax but to no avail- it returns the following message:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u017c' in position 5
1: ordinal not in range(128)

What to do to make those characters display correctly? Yes, I will often work with strings formated in UTF. I would be very grateful for your help.