Unicode blues in Python3

[nn]

Martin v. Loewis wrote:
> nn wrote:
> >
> > Stefan Behnel wrote:
> >> nn, 23.03.2010 19:46:
> >>> Actually what I want is to write a particular byte to standard output,
> >>> and I want this to work regardless of where that output gets sent to.
> >>> I am aware that I could do
> >>> open('nnout','w',encoding='latin1').write(mychar) but I am porting a
> >>> python2 program and don't want to rewrite everything that uses that
> >>> script.
> >> Are you writing text or binary data to stdout?
> >>
> >> Stefan
> >
> > latin1 charset text.
>
> Are you sure about that? If you carefully reconsider, could you come to
> the conclusion that you are not writing text at all, but binary data?
>
> If it really was text that you write, why do you need to use
> U+00FD (LATIN SMALL LETTER Y WITH ACUTE). To my knowledge, that
> character is really infrequently used in practice. So that you try to
> write it strongly suggests that it is not actually text what you are
> writing.
>
> Also, your formulation suggests the same:
>
> "Is there any way to write a value 253 to standard output?"
>
> If you would really be writing text, you'd ask
>
>
> "Is there any way to write '�' to standard output?"
>
> Regards,
> Martin

To be more informative I am both writing text and binary data
together. That is I am embedding text from another source into stream
that uses non-ascii characters as "control" characters. In Python2 I
was processing it mostly as text containing a few "funny" characters.