For some unholy reason, to change Python’s default encoding you have to edit site.py because when it’s ran (on interpreter startup) it deletes sys.setdefaultencoding() (WHY !?) Obviously, this is not portable, because every user of the script would have to do the same.

The fix, is to add the following snippet to the script:

import sys
reload(sys)    # "undeletes" sys.setdefaultencoding()
sys.setdefaultencoding('latin1')