If a command line program is unsure of stdout's encoding, what encoding should it output?
I suggest you use the current locale.
Python2> import localePython2> locale.getpreferredencoding()'UTF-8'The system knows what it should be, and the other side, if it also uses the current locale, will do the right thing.
if your application doesn't really deal with a whole lot of internationalisation, ascii should suffice. but if not, i'd say utf-8 or better still utf-16 should be the order of the day.