Hello, I'm trying to port my package https://github.com/Drekin/win-unicode-console to Python 2 and I'd like to be compatible with IPython. My code monkeypatches builtin function raw_input, which afterwards returns a unicode object rather than str. Unfortunatelly, IPython is not compatible with this under Python 2: IPython.terminal.interactiveshell.TerminalInteractiveShell.raw_input calls IPython.utils.py3compat.str_to_unicode (which is mapped to .decode) on the result of original raw_input. But when raw_input returns a unicode object, trying to decode it leads to encoding it first, and if it contains a non-ascii character, the extra encoding step leads to UnicodeEncodeError since ascii encoding is assumed. The exception leads to "You or a %run:ed script called sys.stdin.close() or sys.stdout.close()!\nExiting IPython!\n" warning and IPython REPL exit. It would be nice if a unicode object was left alone rather then tried to be decoded, i.e. if for example IPython.utils.py3compat.cast_unicode was used instead of .str_to_unicode.