Comment 1 for bug 610229

Bazaar is using the user encoding, which will generally be the right option, but does cause problems like this.

Couple of options. Could add yet another config option for the editor encoding. Using something like the notepad heuristic, which auto-detects unicode encodings and falls back to the windows codepage, would mostly work but leaves the problem of what encoding to *write* to the temporary file. Both still have the potential to mangle the encoding.

Finally, might be worth looking at changing the default to UTF-8 (perhaps with BOM), which most things really should support these days. I still have one editor installed that doesn't support unicode, but everything I use regularly does.