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) 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 about this problem but to my bewilderment no one considered using an environment variable.