when repr() fails

[snippsat]

@Skaperen

>>> print(repr(chr(255)))
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xff' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)
>>> a=repr(chr(255))

Your shell still has ascii as encoding.
You have posted different error about this before.

From a clean Mint 18.1 install.

mint@mint ~ $ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8
mint@mint ~ $ python3 -c"import sys; print(sys.stdout.encoding)"
UTF-8

mint@mint ~ $ python3
Python 3.5.2 (default, Nov 17 2016, 17:05:23) 
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux
>>> import sys
>>> sys.stdout.encoding
'UTF-8'
>>> print(repr(chr(255)))
'ÿ'

>>> # To make your error i have to encode to ascii
>>> a = repr(chr(255))  
>>> a.encode('ascii')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xff' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)