Please don't do this! Especially inside of a python module intended to be imported by others. There's a very good reason why the defaultencoding is removed fr

Please don't do this! Especially inside of a python module intended to be imported by others. There's a very good reason why the defaultencoding is removed from the Python namespace and you have to resort to hackery to access it. http://ziade.org/2008/01/08/syssetdefaultencoding-is-evil/ You should be handling encode/decode explicitly; not resorting to changing the default system encoding. You will break other consumers. As the other poster said, just move to Python 3 and stop worrying about this mess.