Comment 2 for bug 1002581

I agree that that solution would be ideal. Mine is a bit of a hack (as discussed on the commit, it is special-cased for StringIO and there isn't an obvious way to generalise it to all file-like objects that return Unicode strings). Hence the reason I filed a separate bug for StringIO in particular (the more general bug is bug #898072).

Note: We no longer need this fix, as we have fixed our system so that it supports iconv. So it's possibly better to wait until someone actually encounters this problem and needs a fix instead of trying to rewrite code unnecessarily.