raw_input and input should take unicode prompt and encode with sys.stdout.encoding like print or input in py3k.

>>> u = u"あいう"
>>> print u
あいう
>>> x = raw_input(u)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-2: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> import sys
>>> sys.stdout.encoding
'cp932'

I agree that would be nice, but it's usefulness would also be limited by the fact that raw_input always returns a normal string.

The bug is fixed in Python3. I would like to say that you should use Python3 (which has a much better unicode support) instead of Python2 to get such feature, and that this issue should be closed (as wontfix).

"and that this issue should be closed (as wontfix)."

... because this issue has no patch and we are close to 2.7rc1 (and 2.7 should be the last major version of the 3.x branch).

I agree to close this bug without fix.
I hope that Python3 will be mainstream soon.

> I hope that Python3 will be mainstream soon.

What do you mean by "mainstream"? Python3 is available in Ubuntu (since Karmic), Fedora 13, Mandriva 2010.0, Gentoo, Debian (only Sid for now), ...

>What do you mean by "mainstream"? Python3 is available in Ubuntu (since Karmic), Fedora 13, Mandriva 2010.0, Gentoo, Debian (only Sid for now), ...

It means most of Pythonista uses Python3 rather than Python2 and
most of libraries supports Python3.

Currently, many new Pythonista starts with Python2 because libraries
they want support only it, and are suffered by UnicodeError.

annoying stuff, indeed...

$ python -c 'print u"La cl\xe9: "'
La clé: 

$ python -c 'raw_input(u"La cl\xe9: ")'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe9' in position 5: ordinal not in range(128)