Is there a way to change the default string encoding?

[Ron Garret]

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.

Thanks!

rg