diff --git a/direct/src/leveleditor/sitecustomize.py b/direct/src/leveleditor/sitecustomize.py
new file mode 100755
index 0000000000..390ec8a230
--- /dev/null
+++ b/direct/src/leveleditor/sitecustomize.py
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
+# This is required to properly decode the Tk wide-character strings.
+
+import sys
+sys.setdefaultencoding('utf8')
+print "Encoding set to UTF8"