from __future__ import annotations import sys prompts = sys.argv[1:] or ['foo'] # latin1 encoded bytes # to ensure pexpect doesn't have any encoding errors data = b'premi\xe8re is first\npremie?re is slightly different\n????????? is Cyrillic\n? am Deseret\n' sys.stdout.buffer.write(data) print() for prompt in prompts: user_input = input(prompt) print(user_input)