We use umlaut in our docstrings and when we use the help() function to extract the documentation, the function reports an error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character....

Our docstrings are specified as unicode literals and the source file contains the line:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-


just import the module and make:

 help(tudelut.tudelut)

Confirmed.

With Python 2:

>>> import pydoc
>>> pydoc.pipepager(u'tütdelüt\n', 'cat')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "./Lib/pydoc.py", line 1357, in pipepager
    pipe.write(text)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xfc' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)



With Python 3:

>>> import pydoc
>>> pydoc.pipepager('tütdelüt\n', 'cat')
tütdelüt

The unicode text is sent to the subprocess without encoding.
It is encoded implicitly to ASCII (sys.getdefaultencoding()).

This patch performs explicit encoding.
Tests added.

The patch should also work with 8-bit docstrings, and the tests should reflect both uses.

New patch: backward compatibility preserved.

It looks like a duplicate of #6625.