Why is sys.getdefaultencoding() different from sys.stdout.encoding and how does this break Unicode strings?
I spent a few angry hours looking for the problem with Unicode strings that was broken down to something that Python (2.7) hides from me and I still don't understand. First, I tried to use u".." strings consistently in my code, but that resulted in the infamous UnicodeEncodeError . I tried using .encode('utf8') , but that didn't help either. Finally, it turned out I shouldn't use either and it all works out automagically. However, I (here I need to give credit to a friend who helped me) did notice something weird while banging my head against the wall. sys.getdefaultencoding() returns ascii ,