> >> I also found out that, according to RFC 3629, surrogates
> >> are considered invalid and they can't be encoded/decoded,
> >> but the UTF-8 codec actually does it.
> >
> > Python2 does, but Python3 raises an error.
> > (...)
> 
> I wonder how that change got into the 3.x branch - I would certainly
> not have approved it for the reasons given further up on this ticket.
> 
> I think we should revert that change for Python 3.2.

See r72208 and issue #3672.

pitrou wrote "We could fix it for 3.1, and perhaps leave 2.7 unchanged if some 
people rely on this (for whatever reason)."