Message 347805 - Python tracker

As promised there is now a pull request. 

I'd love a review (and a change to approve the pull request when reviewers are happy, I'm trying to get back into actively contributing).

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I now understand why locale.getdefaultlocale() fails even when LC_CTYPE is not set: pylifecycle sets LC_CTYPE to UTF-8 in the UTF-8 coercion code.