You're right that __repr__ was not mentioned, my bad. I think `.encode(locale.getpreferredencoding())` is awful because this changes string encoding from run t

You're right that __repr__ was not mentioned, my bad. I think `.encode(locale.getpreferredencoding())` is awful because this changes string encoding from run to run, and because locale.getpreferredencoding() could be different (and is different by default e.g. in Cyrillic Windows XP) from both `sys.stdout.encoding` (used for printing) and `sys.getdefaultencoding()` (used for implicit type conversions).