How to print UTF-8 encoded text to the console in Python < 3?

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It seems accomplishing this is not recommended.

Fedora suggested using the system locale as the default,
but apparently this breaks other things.

Here’s a quote from the mailing-list discussion:

The only supported default encodings in Python are:

 Python 2.x: ASCII
 Python 3.x: UTF-8

If you change these, you are on your own and strange things will
start to happen. The default encoding does not only affect
the translation between Python and the outside world, but also
all internal conversions between 8-bit strings and Unicode.

Hacks like what's happening in the pango module (setting the
default encoding to 'utf-8' by reloading the site module in
order to get the sys.setdefaultencoding() API back) are just
downright wrong and will cause serious problems since Unicode
objects cache their default encoded representation.

Please don't enable the use of a locale based default encoding.

If all you want to achieve is getting the encodings of
stdout and stdin correctly setup for pipes, you should
instead change the .encoding attribute of those (only).

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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