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Unfortunateny that patch does not fix my problem. The patch
at bug #1080727 fixes the problem for doctests written in
external reST files (testfile and DocFileTest functions). My
problem is related to internal docstring encoding (testmod
for instance). However, Bjorn Tillenius says:
"""
If one writes doctests within documentation strings of
classes and
functions, it's possible to use non-ASCII characters since
one can
specify the encoding used in the source file.
"""
So according to him, docstrings' doctests with non-ascii
characters should work by default. So maybe my system setup
is somewhat broken. Could somebody please confirm/infirm
this by running the attached sample script on his system?

My system config:
LANG=fr_FR@euro (on linux)
python 2.4.1 with:  sys.getdefaultencoding() == 'ascii' 
and locale.getpreferredencoding() == 'ISO-8859-15'
$ file test_iso-8859-15.py
test_iso-8859-15.py: ISO-8859 English text