Sorted out unicode issues, thanks to Lee Semel.

readability/encoding.py

@@ -3,17 +3,15 @@ import chardet
 
 def get_encoding(page):
     text = re.sub('</?[^>]*>\s*', ' ', page)
+    enc = 'utf-8'
     if not text.strip() or len(text) < 10:
-        return 'ascii'
+        return enc # can't guess
     try:
-        enc = 'utf-8'
         diff = text.decode(enc, 'ignore').encode(enc)
         sizes = len(diff), len(text)
-        if abs(len(text) - len(diff)) < max(sizes) * 0.01:
+        if abs(len(text) - len(diff)) < max(sizes) * 0.01: # 99% of utf-8
-            #print '->', enc, '100%'
             return enc
     except UnicodeDecodeError:
-        #import traceback;traceback.print_exc()
         pass
     res = chardet.detect(text)
     enc = res['encoding']

readability/htmls.py

@@ -10,12 +10,12 @@ logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.DEBUG)
 utf8_parser = lxml.html.HTMLParser(encoding='utf-8')
 
 def build_doc(page):
-    if type(page) != unicode:
+    if isinstance(page, unicode):
-        enc = get_encoding(page)
+        page_unicode = page
-        page_enc = page.decode(enc, 'replace')
     else:
-        page_enc = page
+        enc = get_encoding(page)
-    doc = lxml.html.document_fromstring(page_enc.encode('utf-8'), parser=utf8_parser)
+        page_unicode = page.decode(enc, 'replace')
+    doc = lxml.html.document_fromstring(page_unicode.encode('utf-8', 'replace'), parser=utf8_parser)
     return doc
 
 def js_re(src, pattern, flags, repl):

readability/readability.py

@@ -496,8 +496,9 @@ def main():
 		file = urllib.urlopen(options.url)
 	else:
 		file = open(args[0])
+        enc = sys.stdout.encoding or 'utf-8'
 	try:
-		print Document(file.read(), debug=options.verbose).summary().encode('ascii','ignore')
+		print Document(file.read(), debug=options.verbose).summary().encode(enc, 'replace')
 	finally:
 		file.close()