Parsing a non-Unicode string with Flask-RESTful - python-3.x

Question

I have a webhook developed with Flask-RESTful which gets several parameters with POST.
One of the parameters is a non-Unicode string, encoded in cp1251.
Can't find a way to correctly parse this argument using reqparse.
Here is the fragment of my code:
parser = reqparse.RequestParser()
parser.add_argument('text')
msg = parser.parse_args()
Then, I write msg to a text file, and it looks like this:
{"text": "\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd !\n\n\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\n\n-- \n\ufffd \ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd\ufffd."}
As you can see, Flask somehow replaces all Cyrillic characters with \ufffd. At the same time, non-Cyrillic characters, like ! or \n are processed correctly.
Anything I can do to advise RequestParser with the string encoding?
Here is my code for writing the text to disk:
f = open('log_msg.txt', 'w+')
f.write(json.dumps(msg))
f.close()
I tried f = open('log_msg.txt', 'w+', encoding='cp1251') with the same result.
Then, I tried
f = open('log_msg_ascii.txt', 'w+')
f.write(ascii(json.dumps(msg)))
Also, no difference.
So, I'm pretty sure it's RequestParser() tries to be too smart and can't understand the non-Unicode input.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Okay, I finally found a workaround. Thanks to #lenz for helping me with this issue. It seems that reqparse wrongly assumes that every string parameter comes as UTF-8. So when it sees a non-Unicode input field (among other Unicode fields!), it tries to load it as Unicode and fails. As a result, all characters are U+FFFD (replacement character).
So, to access that non-Unicode field, I did the following trick.
First, I load raw data using get_data(), decode it using cp1251 and parse with a simple regexp.
raw_data = request.get_data()
contents = raw_data.decode('windows-1251')
match = re.search(r'(?P<delim>--\w+\r?\n)Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"text\"\r?\n(.*?)(?P=delim)', contents, re.MULTILINE | re.DOTALL)
text = match.group(2)
Not the most beautiful solution, but it works.