"I don't believe that the first parameter to tparm() (the format string) is ever constructed by hand, because it's terminal specific. The value is obtained from the terminfo database by calling tigetstr() instead. Furthermore, tigetstr() returns binary data, for which bytes is the only sane representation, and therefore tparm() should expect bytes instead of str."

Ok, it sounds to be fair. I wrote a patch based on yours (except that Python crashes with your patch :-)).