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+=====================
+Unicode and Encodings
+=====================
+
+Since Pygments 0.6, all lexers use unicode strings internally. Because of that
+you might encounter the occasional :exc:`UnicodeDecodeError` if you pass strings
+with the wrong encoding.
+
+Per default all lexers have their input encoding set to `latin1`.
+If you pass a lexer a string object (not unicode), it tries to decode the data
+using this encoding.
+You can override the encoding using the `encoding` lexer option. If you have the
+`chardet`_ library installed and set the encoding to ``chardet`` if will ananlyse
+the text and use the encoding it thinks is the right one automatically:
+
+.. sourcecode:: python
+
+    from pygments.lexers import PythonLexer
+    lexer = PythonLexer(encoding='chardet')
+
+The best way is to pass Pygments unicode objects. In that case you can't get
+unexpected output.
+
+The formatters now send Unicode objects to the stream if you don't set the
+output encoding. You can do so by passing the formatters an `encoding` option:
+
+.. sourcecode:: python
+
+    from pygments.formatters import HtmlFormatter
+    f = HtmlFormatter(encoding='utf-8')
+
+**You will have to set this option if you have non-ASCII characters in the
+source and the output stream does not accept Unicode written to it!**
+This is the case for all regular files and for terminals.
+
+Note: The Terminal formatter tries to be smart: if its output stream has an
+`encoding` attribute, and you haven't set the option, it will encode any
+Unicode string with this encoding before writing it. This is the case for
+`sys.stdout`, for example. The other formatters don't have that behavior.
+
+Another note: If you call Pygments via the command line (`pygmentize`),
+encoding is handled differently, see :doc:`the command line docs <cmdline>`.
+
+.. versionadded:: 0.7
+   The formatters now also accept an `outencoding` option which will override
+   the `encoding` option if given. This makes it possible to use a single
+   options dict with lexers and formatters, and still have different input and
+   output encodings.
+
+.. _chardet: http://chardet.feedparser.org/