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I've thought about this some more: I'm not sure whether it
is such a good idea to try to move code from the codecs into
the standard file object - after all, the codecs already
support all this and do a much better job at handling error
cases and the like.

Furthermore, codecs support both directions: reading and
writing. Your patch only does one way.

The encoding support you currently find in the file object
is only needed for printing Unicode objects - it is not used
anywhere else.