This is in reference to SF bug # 644005 http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=103&atid=100103&func=detail&aid=644005 When there are realnames of members with "funny" characters in them, sync_members and list_members can throw UnicodeError exceptions because it's trying to print strings with characters ord > 128. I've implemented a fix to first sys.getdefaultencoding() and then actually print ustr.encode(enc, 'replace') to stdout. That fixed the problem for me, but is it the right solution? On a related note, and I know this has been discussed on python-dev, is it really not possible to call sys.setdefaultencoding() anywhere in Python except by hacking site.py? PyUnicode_SetDefaultEncoding() seems to only be exported to Python via sys, but that is deleted by site.py after being called once. This seems quite shortsighted (maybe I should raise this on python-dev). Say my terminal can handle iso-8859-1. I'd like to be able to set the default encoding to that somewhere that user-specific, say PYTHONSTARTUP if I'm running interactively. But that seems impossible, and I don't think hacking site.py is the appropriate response. What if someone else at my site uses a different terminal that can't print iso-8859-1? -Barry