Amaury Forgeot d'Arc wrote:
> 
> Amaury Forgeot d'Arc <amauryfa@gmail.com> added the comment:
> 
> (Presented this way, "my opinion" becomes difficult to stand...
> OTOH the docs say that the module does not support Unicode, so it's not
> strictly a bug)
> http://docs.python.org/library/shlex.html
> 
> Yes, shlex could be improved and encode unicode strings to ascii.

I'd suggest to convert Unicode input to a string using an
optional encoding parameter which defaults to 'utf-8' (most
shells nowadays default to UTF-8).

This is only a compromise, though, albeit a practical one.
POSIX has the notion of a portable character set:

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/basedefs/xbd_chap06.html#tagtcjh_3

which is pretty much the same as ASCII. Any ASCII compatible
encoding is then allowed via variable length encodings (see
further down on that page).