Many multibyte language users are difficult to see 
native characters on list or dictionary and etc.
This patch allows printing multibyte on UNIX98-
compatible machines; mbtowc() is ISO/IEC 9899:1990 
standard C-API function.

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Even though I think this patch is correct in principle, I
see a few problems with it:
1. Since it doesn't fix a bug, it probably cannot go into 2.2.
2. There is no autoconf test for mbtowc. You should test
this in configure, and then conditionalize your code on
HAVE_MBTOWC.
3. There is too much code duplication. Try to find a
solution which special-cases the escape codes (\something)
only once. For example, you may implement a trivial mbtowc
redefinition if mbtowc is not available, and then use mbtowc
always.

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I don't understand the point of using mbtowc() here.

The code extracts a wide character, but then it uses
isprint() on it, and as far as I know, isprint() is not
defined on wide characters, only on 'unsigned char' (and on
-1).

Isn't what the author wants simply to is isprint(c) instead
of (c < ' ' || c >= 0x7f)???

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You are right, the code should use iswprint instead.

The point is that multiple subsequent bytes can make up a
single printable character. Not every character above 127 is
necessarily printable (e.g. in Latin-1, only characters
above 160 are printable). Likewise, a single byte may not be
printable, but a combination will print fine. So this code
is supposed to catch only those cases where printing will
actually work.

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Yes, it should be changed to iswprint on Linux systems. 
(but, isprint of BSD systems was designed for wide 
characters)
As loewis told, EUC codes of Korea, Japan, Taiwan doesn't 
use 0x7F-0x9F for printable character. So, I think that 
using mbtowc is unavoidable.

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Still, the patch as it exists is unacceptable -- it needs
configure support to decide whether to use mbtowc() and
whether to use iswprint() or isprint() (I would hope on BSD
there is also an iswprint(), to be standard-conforming).

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I uploaded 2nd patches which contains configure support.
Unfortunately, Citrus(new generation locale support for 
*BSDs) didn't implemented iswprint() yet. but *BSDs 
supports wide character via Rune Locale isprint() func.

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Oops, one mistake. sorry.

stringobject.c:646

else if (_ISPRINT(c)) {
-> 
else if (cr > 0 && _ISPRINT(c)) {

(to detect whether mbtowc failed to convert)

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Thanks for the patch, committed as

configure 1.343;
configure.in 1.354;
pyconfig.h.in 1.51;
stringobject.c 2.190;

I'm not quite sure that your correction is correct: If we
invoke iswprint, cr is already guaranteed to be >0, since we
otherwise goto nonprintable.

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The patch was causing too many problems, so I had to back it
out.