I am writing a Python (Python 3.3) program to send some data to a webpage using POST method. Mostly for debugging process I am getting the page result and displaying it on the screen using `print()` function.

The code is like this:

```
conn.request("POST", resource, params, headers)
response = conn.getresponse()
print(response.status, response.reason)
data = response.read()
print(data.decode('utf-8'));

```

the `HTTPResponse` `.read()` method returns a `bytes` element encoding the page (which is a well formated UTF-8 document) It seemed okay until I stopped using IDLE GUI for Windows and used the Windows console instead. The returned page has a U+2014 character (em-dash) which the print function translates well in the Windows GUI (I presume Code Page 1252) but does not in the Windows Console (Code Page 850). Given the `strict` default behavior I get the following error:

```
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2014' in position 10248: character maps to <undefined>

```

I could fix it using this quite ugly code:

```
print(data.decode('utf-8').encode('cp850','replace').decode('cp850'))

```

Now it replace the offending character "—" with a `?`. Not the ideal case (a hyphen should be a better replacement) but good enough for my purpose.

There are several things I do not like from my solution.

1. The code is ugly with all that decoding, encoding, and decoding.
2. It solves the problem for just this case. If I port the program for a system using some other encoding (latin-1, cp437, back to cp1252, etc.) it should recognize the target encoding. It does not. (for instance, when using again the IDLE GUI, the emdash is also lost, which didn't happen before)
3. It would be nicer if the emdash translated to a hyphen instead of a interrogation bang.

The problem is not the emdash (I can think of several ways to solve that particularly problem) but I need to write robust code. I am feeding the page with data from a database and that data can come back. I can anticipate many other conflicting cases: an 'Á' U+00c1 (which is possible in my database) could translate into CP-850 (DOS/Windows Console encodign for Western European Languages) but not into CP-437 (encoding for US English, which is default in many Windows instalations).

So, the question:

Is there a nicer solution that makes my code agnostic from the output interface encoding?