Just to elaborate, on a fresh Windows 7 install with en_CA locale, this was the behaviour: python3 -c 'print("é")' é python3 -c 'print("é")' > out.txt

Just to elaborate, on a fresh Windows 7 install with en_CA locale, this was the behaviour: python3 -c 'print("é")' é python3 -c 'print("é")' > out.txt (UnicodeEncodeError) 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xe9' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128) I felt that was unacceptable behaviour for my program, but it was beyond my ability to fix. Though, I think this has been addressed in more recent Python releases.