On Unix, it is the encoding of the LC_CTYPE locale. It can be set with locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, new_locale).

On Windows, it is the ANSI code page (ex: "cp1252").

On Android and VxWorks, Python uses "utf-8" as the locale encoding.

locale.getencoding() can be used to get the locale encoding.

See also the filesystem encoding and error handler.