AI article
Why your Python tool corrupts text on Windows, and why chcp 65001 doesn't fix it
Community description: I lost an afternoon to a config file last week. The graph name was right there in the JSON, spelled...
Dev.to | Sep 12, 2026 | MilkyWay008
Automated excerpt
Both are one thing: Python's default text encoding on Windows is not UTF-8. That's UTF-8 mode (PEP 540, available since 3. 7). It makes open() default to UTF-8, switches the filesystem encoding to UTF-8, and, the part that matters here, makes locale. getpreferredencoding() return utf-8 so pipe decoding gets the right codec.
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