Thank you Random832 and Peter - excellent ideas. My use case was diagnostic output being (temporarily) output to stdout via debug related print statements. The output is for debugging only and not meant for production. I was looking for a solution that would allow me to output to the console with as few changes to the original scripts as possible, eg. non-invasive except for the print statements themselves.
When debugging under Linux/OSX, standard print statements work fine because their stdouts' encoding is UTF-8. But under Windows, the stdout is workstation specific and *never* UTF-8. So the occasional non-ASCII string trips up our diagnostic output when tested under Windows. Peter's suggestion to set the PYTHONIOENCODING [1] environment variable is the non-invasive, diagnostic only, non-production solution I was looking for ... for the use case at hand. Again, thank you both. Malcolm [1] PYTHONIOENCODING=ascii:backslashreplace -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
