It would be nice if there would be an escape hatch for situations where the value of locale.getpreferredencoding() can't be changed (eg: windows - try changing that to utf8 http://blog.ionelmc.ro/2014/06/19/just-another-day-using-python-3/) in the form of an environment variable like PYTHONPREFERREDENCODING (or something like that). The idea is that it would override the default encoding for open() for platforms/situations where it's infeasible to manually specify the encoding to open (eg: lots of old code) or change locale to something utf8-ish (windows). I've found an old thread http://grokbase.com/t/python/python-dev/116w24gdra/open-set-the-default-enco... about this problem but to my bewilderment no one considered using an environment variable. Thanks, -- Ionel M.