Comment 7 for bug 1666829

An additional thought: if my understanding of the documentation is correct, the default encoding used for the operations that fail for me is based on the user's current locale settings. That could mean they can also occur on Linux for users who use a more or less exotic locale.

In other words, if it is certain that Arte only serves UTF8 text data it might be best to figure out how to make Qarte use UTF8 encoding throughout explicitly, or generalise my patch by replacing the standard open(name,mode) function by codecs.open(name,mode,'utf8').