Until I converted MMA to work in both python 2 and 3 there was no encoding at all. It's really just a "problem" with python3.x
However, I don't see it really being that much of a problem.
- when opening source files in PY3 one really does need to guess as to the nature of the file. I don't think that restricting to a "latin 8" type of character set is a big deal. If non-english characters are needed, they can be inserted as multi byte things.
- I really don't have any access to non-latin8 data. But, it might be a thought to have an environment variable "MMA_ENCODING" and to insert that for encoding values in the 3 locations where it is used. At least I'd be off the hook if there are any problems
Easy enough to do at this end: Just look for the variable and save it in globals and then insert it when needed. I think I picked cp1252 as a "reasonable value to use".