When testing and on Windows, iomenu.encoding and .errors are set to utf-8 and surrogateescape*. When running otherwise, these are set with baroque code I don't understand. (Currently lines 31 to 61.) 1. Combine the two conditional statements for testing and Windows. 2. Ned, on my Catalina Macbook, the 30-line 'else' sections sets encoding, errors to 'utf-8', 'strict'. Should there ever be any other result on Mac we care about? If not, I would like to directly set them, as on Windows. 3. Serhiy, does the 'baroque code' look right to you, for Linux (or *nix in general)?