Android default system encoding is UTF-8 as specified at http://developer.android.com/reference/java/nio/charset/Charset.html
<quote>The platform's default charset is UTF-8. (This is in contrast to some older implementations, where the default charset depended on the user's locale.) </quote>
> If the platform doesn't provide anything, we can maybe adopt the same
> approach than Mac OS X: force the encoding to UTF-8 and just don't use
> the C library.
The attached patch does the same thing as proposed by Victor but emphasizes that Android does not HAVE_LANGINFO_H and does not have CODESET. And the fact that HAVE_LANGINFO_H and CODESET are not defined causes other problems (maybe as well in Mac OS X). In that case, PyCursesWindow_New() in _cursesmodule.c falls back nicely to "utf-8", but _Py_device_encoding() in fileutils.c instead does a Py_RETURN_NONE. It seems that this impacts _io_TextIOWrapper___init___impl() in textio.c and os_device_encoding_impl() in posixmodule.c. And indeed, os.device_encoding(0) returns None on android.