def unicode_stdio ():
    """Make sure that the standard I/O streams accept Unicode.

    In Python 2, the standard I/O streams accept bytes, not Unicode
    characters. This means that in principle every Unicode string that we want
    to output should be encoded to utf-8 before print()ing. But Python 2.X has
    a hack where, if the output is a terminal, it will automatically encode
    your strings, using UTF-8 in most cases.

    BUT this hack doesn't kick in if you pipe your program's output to another
    program. So it's easy to write a tool that works fine in most cases but then
    blows up when you log its output to a file.

    The proper solution is just to do the encoding right. This function sets
    things up to do this in the most sensible way I can devise, if we're
    running on Python 2. This approach sets up compatibility with Python 3,
    which has the stdio streams be in text mode rather than bytes mode to
    begin with.

    Basically, every command-line Python program should call this right at
    startup. I'm tempted to just invoke this code whenever this module is
    imported since I foresee many accidentally omissions of the call.

    """
    if six.PY3:
        return

    enc = sys.stdin.encoding or 'utf-8'
    sys.stdin = codecs.getreader (enc) (sys.stdin)
    enc = sys.stdout.encoding or enc
    sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter (enc) (sys.stdout)
    enc = sys.stderr.encoding or enc
    sys.stderr = codecs.getwriter (enc) (sys.stderr)