#!/usr/bin/env python2.7
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import argparse


class ArgumentParserWriteUTF8(argparse.ArgumentParser):
    """Subclass of ArgumentParser that outputs UTF-8 properly

    Standard ArgumentParser in argparse outputs help messages without
    converting to UTF-8. This fails if the message is a unicode string
    containing non-ASCII characters and output is redirected (to a
    pipe or a file). Unredirected output seems OK. See
    http://bugs.python.org/issue9779
    This class fixes it. It will probably not be needed in Python 3.
    """
    def _print_message(self, message, file=None):
        """Output message to file, encoded as UTF-8 """
        if message:
            if file is None:
                file = _sys.stderr
            file.write(message.encode('utf-8'))

parser = ArgumentParserWriteUTF8(description = u'שלום')
parser.parse_args()