UTF-8 and stdin/stdout?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> 	$ cat utf8_from_stdin.py
> 	import sys
> 	data = sys.stdin.read()
> 	print "length of data =", len(data)

sys.stdin is a byte stream in Python 2, not a character stream.
To make it a character stream, do

sys.stdin = codecs.getreader("utf-8")(sys.stdin)

HTH,
Martin