I can sympathize, Windows is my environment too. But I'm not blind to other environments where some simplifying assumptions can be made. For true insanity try

I can sympathize, Windows is my environment too. But I'm not blind to other environments where some simplifying assumptions can be made. For true insanity try adding IDLE to the mix. IDLE under Windows in Python 2 will let you output UTF-8, but won't accept it as input. Python 3 is more consistent.