How to use 8bit character sets?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

John Roth wrote:
>> That is the default.
> 
> 
> As far as I can tell, there are actually two defaults, which tends
> to confuse things.

Notice that there are two defaults already in the operating system:
Windows has the notion of the "ANSI code page" and the "OEM code
page", which are used in different contexts.

> One is used whenever a unicode to 8-bit
> conversion is needed on output to stdout, stderr or similar;
> that's usually Latin-1 (or whatever the installation has set up.)

You mean, in Python? No, this is not how it works. On output
of 8-bit strings to stdout, no conversion is ever performed:
the byte strings are written to stdout as-is.

> The other is used whenever the unicode to 8-bit conversion
> doesn't have a context - that's usually Ascii-7.

Again, you seem to be talking about Unicode conversions -
it's not clear that the OP is actually interested in
Unicode conversion in the first place.

Regards,
Martin