Thomas Heller:
OTOH, Python is lacking a lot when you have to handle unicode strings on sys.path, in command line arguments, environment variables and maybe other places.
A new patch #1231336 "Add unicode for sys.argv, os.environ, os.system" is now in SourceForge. New parallel features sys.argvu and os.environu are provided and os.system accepts unicode arguments similar to PEP 277. A screenshot showing why the existing features are inadequate and the new features an enhancement are at http://www.scintilla.org/pyunicode.png One problem is that when using "python -c cmd args", sys.argvu includes the "cmd" but sys.argv does not. They both contain the "-c". os.system was changed to make it easier to add some test cases but then that looked like too much trouble. There are far too many variants on exec*, spawn* and popen* to write a quick patch for these. Neil