Three patches from issue #1047, by Amaury Forgeot d'Arc: 1/ getargs.diff adds the 'Z' and 'Z#' format specifiers for PyArg_ParseTuple. They mimic z and z# for unicode strings, by accepting a Unicode or None (in which case the Py_UNICODE* pointer is set to NULL). With doc and tests. 2/ subprocess.diff converts file PC/_subprocess.c to unicode. We use the Unicode version of the win32 api (and Z conversion from previous patch) 3/ stdout.diff: sys.stdout must not convert the line endings, Windows already does it. Without this patch, when redirecting the output of python, the file contains \r\r\n for each line. (test_subprocess did catch this) However, I (GvR) removed the change to _fileio.c (included in the patches) that prevents closing file descripors < 3 from being closed; I think that needs to be solved in a different way.