Changing the “locale preferred encoding” in Python 3 in Windows

As of python3.5.1 this hack looks like this:

import _locale
_locale._getdefaultlocale = (lambda *args: ['en_US', 'utf8'])

All files opened thereafter will assume the default encoding to be utf8.

i know its a real hacky workaround, but you could redefine the locale.getpreferredencoding() function like so:

import locale
def getpreferredencoding(do_setlocale = True):
    return "utf-8"
locale.getpreferredencoding = getpreferredencoding

if you run this early on, all files opened after (at lest in my testing on a win xp machine) open in utf-8, and as this overrides the module method this would apply to all platforms.

The post is old but the issue is still of actuality (under Python 3.7 and Windows 10).

I've improved the solution as follows, making sure that the language/country part isn't overwritten but only the encoding, and also to make sure that it is only done under Windows:

if os.name == "nt":
    import _locale
    _locale._gdl_bak = _locale._getdefaultlocale
    _locale._getdefaultlocale = (lambda *args: (_locale._gdl_bak()[0], 'utf8'))

Hope this helps...

Locale can be set in windows globally to UTF-8, if you so desire, as follows:

Control panel -> Clock and Region -> Region -> Administrative -> Change system locale -> Check Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 ...

After this, and a reboot, I confirmed that locale.getpreferredencoding() returns 'cp65001' (=UTF-8) and that functions like open default to UTF-8.