stijn: You are mixing two issues here. One is reading text from a file. There is no problem with it. You just call open(path, encoding=the_encoding_of_the_file). Since the encoding of the file depends on the file, you should provide the information about it.

Another issue is interactively entering and displaying Unicode characters in Python REPL in Windows console. That's what is this issue about. The streams code you use is outdated, for recent version see https://pypi.python.org/pypi/win_unicode_console and https://github.com/Drekin/win-unicode-console. It's an installable package which tries to solve the issue. The readme also contains a summary of the issue. Try the package and let me know if there is any problem.