Unicode question

[Christos TZOTZIOY Georgiou]

On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 17:47:30 +0200, rumours say that Gerhard Häring
<gh at ghaering.de> might have written:

>>>> u"äöü"
>u'\x84\x94\x81'
>
>(Python 2.2.3/2.3b2; sys.getdefaultencoding() == "ascii")
>
>Why does this work?
>
>Does Python guess which encoding I mean? I thought Python should refuse 
>to guess :-)

Same here, it assumes iso8859-1, which has nothing to do with my
Windows, Linux and Irix systems (ie Windows has cp1253, and I tried Irix
and Linux pythons with el_GR settings).
-- 
TZOTZIOY, I speak England very best,
Microsoft Security Alert: the Matrix began as open source.