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I agree with you that writing Unicode objects to a binary
file should raise an exception, but with the 'et#' format
string, 8-bit string objects should pass through file.write
unrecoded.

About your second comment: Yes, codecs is one way to do it,
but then I think that the encoding handling for print should
be ripped out, too. After all, that's what many people
complain about: "print unistr" works, while
"sys.stdout.write(unistr)" does not. As the comment below
about bug 1099364 shows, this shows up in various locations.

If this is rejected, file.write() shouldn't accept Unicode
anymore, and print should behave the same way.