Force UTF-8 locale when reading configs and data

Force UTF-8 locale when reading configs and data

Apparently, Python on Windows defaults to assuming CP1252 encoding
unless otherwise specified, as opposed to the UTF-8 assumption made
on POSIX platforms. Since our configuration and data files are
expected to always use UTF-8 encoding, be clear in the
ConfigParser.read() calls about that. We only do this under Python
3.x, as that method doesn't have an encoding parameter in 2.7.

Thanks to Lance Bermudez for reporting this.