Issue #8622: Add PYTHONFSENCODING environment variable to override the

filesystem encoding.

initfsencoding() displays also a better error message if get_codeset() failed.

2 files changed, 21 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/Doc/using/cmdline.rst b/Doc/using/cmdline.rst
index 81d118b..c1130e4 100644
--- a/Doc/using/cmdline.rst
+++ b/Doc/using/cmdline.rst
@@ -442,11 +442,20 @@ These environment variables influence Python's behavior.
    import of source modules.
 
 
+.. envvar:: PYTHONFSENCODING
+
+   If this is set before running the intepreter, it overrides the encoding used
+   for the filesystem encoding (see :func:`sys.getfilesystemencoding`).
+
+   .. versionadded:: 3.2
+
+
 .. envvar:: PYTHONIOENCODING
 
-   Overrides the encoding used for stdin/stdout/stderr, in the syntax
-   ``encodingname:errorhandler``.  The ``:errorhandler`` part is optional and
-   has the same meaning as in :func:`str.encode`.
+   If this is set before running the intepreter, it overrides the encoding used
+   for stdin/stdout/stderr, in the syntax ``encodingname:errorhandler``. The
+   ``:errorhandler`` part is optional and has the same meaning as in
+   :func:`str.encode`.
 
    For stderr, the ``:errorhandler`` part is ignored; the handler will always be
    ``'backslashreplace'``.
diff --git a/Doc/whatsnew/3.2.rst b/Doc/whatsnew/3.2.rst
index a2b7af4..1799b70 100644
--- a/Doc/whatsnew/3.2.rst
+++ b/Doc/whatsnew/3.2.rst
@@ -232,6 +232,15 @@ Major performance enhancements have been added:
 
 * Stub
 
+
+Unicode
+=======
+
+The filesystem encoding can be specified by setting the
+:envvar:`PYTHONFSENCODING` environment variable before running the intepreter.
+The value should be a string in the form ``<encoding>``, e.g. ``utf-8``.
+
+
 IDLE
 ====