Standard Python header

unicode_header.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

# Python *sucks* at UTF-8 (don't tell me "It's fixed in Python 3"; I don't care, plus no one uses Python 3)
# If you put this at the top of every Python script, however, it get rids of most of the headaches dealing with STDIN
# and STDOUT (basically, akin to "perl -C31"). I don't know if it's all necessary; I just know that if I put it at
# the top of my scripts, most of the problems go away, and I can stop thinking about it.

import sys
import codecs

reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8')
sys.stdin = codecs.getreader('utf-8')(sys.stdin)
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf-8')(sys.stdout)
sys.stdout.encoding = 'utf-8'