Victor said:
Why do you set the code page to 65001? In all my tests (on Windows XP), it always break the standard input.

My response:
Because when I searched Windows for Unicode and/or UTF-8 stuff, I found 65001, and it seems like it might help, and it does a bit.  And then I find PYTHONIOENCODING, and that helps some.  And that got me something that works better enough than what I had before, so I quit searching.

You did a better job of analyzing and testing all the cases.  I will have to go subtract the 65001 part, and confirm your results, maybe it is useless now that other pieces of the puzzle are in place.  Certainly with David-Sarah's code it seems to not be needed, whether it was a necessary part of the previous workaround I am not sure, because of the limited number of cases I tried (trying to find something that worked well enough, but not having enough knowledge to find David-Sarah's solution, nor a good enough testing methodology to try the pieces independently.

Thank your for your interest in this issue.