[Python-ideas] "Escape hatch" for preferred encoding (default encoding for `open`)

[Ionel Maries Cristian]

It would be nice if there would be an escape hatch for situations where the
value of locale.getpreferredencoding() can't be changed (eg: windows - try
changing that to utf8
<http://blog.ionelmc.ro/2014/06/19/just-another-day-using-python-3/>) in
the form of an environment variable like PYTHONPREFERREDENCODING (or
something like that).

The idea is that it would override the default encoding for open() for
platforms/situations where it's infeasible to manually specify the encoding
to open (eg: lots of old code) or change locale to something utf8-ish
(windows).

I've found an old thread
<http://grokbase.com/t/python/python-dev/116w24gdra/open-set-the-default-encoding-to-utf-8-in-python-3-3>
about this problem but to my bewilderment no one considered using an
environment variable.


Thanks,
-- Ionel M.
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