The input builtin always uses "strict" error handling for Unicode conversions. This means that when I enter a latin-1 string in a utf-8 environment, input breaks with a UnicodeDecodeError. Now don't tell me not to do that, I have a valid use-case. ;-)

While "strict" may be a good default choice, it is clearly not sufficient. I would like to propose an optional 'errors' argument to input, similar to the 'errors' argument the decode and encode methods have.

I have in fact implemented such an input method for my own use:
https://github.com/stefanholek/rl/blob/surrogate-input/rl/input.c

While this solves my immediate needs, the fact that my implementation is basically just a copy of bltinmode.input with one additional argument, makes me think that this could be fixed in Python proper.

There cannot be a reason input() should be confined to "strict", or can there? ;-)