> Please address UTF-8 mode explicitly in open() or elsewhere. The locale
> module is about the state of the lib C, not what Python enforces via
> options in its own I/O layers.

I agree with you. APIs in locale module shouldn't aware UTF-8 mode.

`locale.getpreferredencoding()` is special, because it "Return the encoding used for text data, according to user preferences. User preferences are expressed differently on different systems, and might not be available programmatically on some systems, so this function only returns a guess."


> As mentioned, both should ideally be synchronized, though, so
> UTF-8 mode in Python should trigger setting a UTF-8 encoding
> via setlocale().

There is PEP 538 already :)