R. David Murray: I understand that the behavior of programs differ if stdout is redirected. I just claim that at least in Windows, stdin and stdout are completely independent, so redirecting *stdout* shouldn't affect how data are read from *stdin*.
I know that Unicode handling in Windows is a completely different issue. I was just explaining how I ran into this issue. During my work on `win-unicode-console` I found out there is some (at least for me) suprising behavior regarding the stdio implementation in Python. So I raised issues (this one, issue17620, issue18597, issue18838).