STINNER Victor wrote:
> 
> STINNER Victor <victor.stinner@haypocalc.com> added the comment:
> 
> My tests with 7-zip and WinRAR conviced me that it's not a good idea to use utf-8 *by default* on Windows. But since mbcs doesn't support surrogateescape error handler, we should restore the previous behaviour just for this encoding.
> 
> tarfile_mbcs_errors.patch creates a function choose_errors() which determine the best error handler depending on the encoding and the mode (read or write):
>  - "strict" to write with mbcs
>  - "replace" to read with mbcs
>  - "surrogateescape" otherwise

I think you should implement this in a more general way:
have the class test whether the codec supports "surrogateescape"
and then use it. Otherwise fall back to "strict" for writing
and "replace" for reading.