Encoding confusion, please help

[Pekka Niiranen]

Hi,

Probing my system from Python 2.3.4 gives

 >>> import locale, sys
 >>> locale.getdefaultlocale()
('fi_FI', 'cp1252')
 >>> locale.getpreferredencoding()
'cp1252'
 >>> sys.getdefaultencoding()
'iso-8859-1'

Manual says:

locale.getpreferredencoding():
Return the encoding used for text data, according to user preferences...

sys.getdefaultencoding()
Return the name of the current default string encoding
used by the Unicode implementation

When should I use locale.getpreferredencoding() and when
sys.getdefaultencoding()?

Why two different encodings 'cp1252' and 'iso-8859-1' are provided
for my Windows 2000 system?

-pekka-