Is there a way to change the default string encoding?

[Peter Otten]

Ron Garret wrote:

> In article <fadvvr$ogf$00$1 at news.t-online.com>,
>  Peter Otten <__peter__ at web.de> wrote:
> 
>> If all else fails there's
>> 
>> >>> sys.setdefaultencoding("latin1")
>> >>> "Andre\xe9 Ramel".decode()
>> u'Andre\xe9 Ramel'
>> 
>> but that's an evil hack, you should rather talk to the maintainer of the
>> offending code to update it to accept unicode.
> 
> Yes, but I need to hack around it until I can get it fixed.

Oops, the snippet above omits the actual hack. It should be

>>> import sys
>>> reload(sys)
<module 'sys' (built-in)>
>>> sys.setdefaultencoding("latin1")
>>> "Andre\xe9 Ramel".decode()
u'Andre\xe9 Ramel'

Peter