Problem with sets and Unicode strings

[Fredrik Lundh]

Dennis Benzinger wrote:

>>> shadows the error of not setting sys.defaultencoding()?
 >>
>> You can't set the default encoding. If you could, then scripts that run 
>> on your machine wouldn't run on mine.
>> [...]
> 
> As Serge Orlov wrote in one of his posts you _can_ set the default 
> encoding (at least in site.py). See 
> <http://docs.python.org/lib/module-sys.html>

yes, but you're not supposed to do that, for several reasons, including 
the reasons Robert provided: if you mess with the interpreter defaults, 
code you write isn't portable, and code written by others may not work 
on your machine.

the interpreter isn't fully encoding agnostic either; things are not 
guaranteed to work properly if you're not using the default.

</F>