Message1938

I don't think this patch is going in the right direction.  Rather than slipping in a quick fix for this particular case, we need to figure out exactly what CPython was doing in 2.2 and what CPython is doing currently.  If the current behavior won't break 2.2's expectations in a horrible way, we can add it to our 2.2.  Just shoehorning a fix in for this one case could lead to weirdly inconsistent behavior in different parts of the code, which I really want to avoid.

Did you try setting the default encoding?  You can do it from java with org.python.core.codecs.setDefaultEncoding.