I need to control a program by sending commands in utf-8 encoding to its standard input. For this I run the program using subprocess.Popen(): proc = Popen("myexecutable.exe", shell=True, stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE) proc.stdin.write(u'ééé'.encode('utf_8')) If I run this from a cygwin utf-8 console, it works. If I run it from a windows console (encoding ='cp1252') this doesn't work. Is there a way to make this work without having to install a cygwin utf-8 console on each computer I want it to run from ? (NB: I don't need to output anything to console)