Unfortunately, I can't see what "encoding" I should use if I want to read & write Unicode string objects to it. ;( (Marc-Andre, please tell me I've missed something!)

It depends on the output you want to have. One option would be s=codecs.lookup('unicode-escape')[3](sys.stdout) Then, s.write(u'\251') prints a string in Python quoting notation. Unfortunately, print >>s,u'\251' won't work, since print *first* tries to convert the argument to a string, and then prints the string onto the stream.

On the other hand, it's annoying that I can't create a file-object that takes Unicode strings from "print", and doesn't seem intuitive.

Since you are asking for a hack :-) How about having an additional letter of 'u' in the "mode" attribute of a file object? Then, print would be def print(stream,string): if type(string) == UnicodeType: if 'u' in stream.mode: stream.write(string) return stream.write(str(string)) The Stream readers and writers would then need to have a mode or 'ru' or 'wu', respectively. Any other protocol to signal unicode-awareness in a stream might do as well. Regards, Martin P.S. Is there some function to retrieve the UCN names from ucnhash.c?