Comment 8 for bug 341594

This is a Python thing. You can create, for example, /usr/lib/pythonv.v/site-packages/sitecustomize.py containing

import sys
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')

and this will set the default unicode encoding to utf8 as long as Python is run without the -S option. The sitecustomize.py module can be anywhere in the sys.path buily by site.py.