diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index b2c07ad5a..2e8a97434 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -31,6 +31,13 @@ New features added
 Release 0.5.1 (in development)
 ==============================
 
+* Don't crash on failing doctests with non-ASCII characters.
+
+* Don't crash on writing status messages and warnings containing
+  unencodable characters.
+
+* Warn if a doctest extension block doesn't contain any code.
+
 * Fix the handling of ``:param:`` and ``:type:`` doc fields when
   they contain markup (especially cross-referencing roles).
 
diff --git a/sphinx/application.py b/sphinx/application.py
index f7c57592a..91a724dc8 100644
--- a/sphinx/application.py
+++ b/sphinx/application.py
@@ -149,13 +149,20 @@ class Sphinx(object):
 
     def warn(self, message):
         self._warncount += 1
-        self._warning.write('WARNING: %s\n' % message)
+        try:
+            self._warning.write('WARNING: %s\n' % message)
+        except UnicodeEncodeError:
+            encoding = getattr(self._warning, 'encoding', 'ascii')
+            self._warning.write(('WARNING: %s\n' % message).encode(encoding, 'replace'))
 
     def info(self, message='', nonl=False):
-        if nonl:
+        try:
             self._status.write(message)
-        else:
-            self._status.write(message + '\n')
+        except UnicodeEncodeError:
+            encoding = getattr(self._status, 'encoding', 'ascii')
+            self._status.write(message.encode(encoding, 'replace'))
+        if not nonl:
+            self._status.write('\n')
         self._status.flush()
 
     # general extensibility interface
diff --git a/sphinx/ext/doctest.py b/sphinx/ext/doctest.py
index b03f42fb3..8212028dd 100644
--- a/sphinx/ext/doctest.py
+++ b/sphinx/ext/doctest.py
@@ -13,6 +13,7 @@
 import re
 import sys
 import time
+import codecs
 import StringIO
 from os import path
 # circumvent relative import
@@ -172,7 +173,8 @@ class DocTestBuilder(Builder):
 
         date = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
 
-        self.outfile = file(path.join(self.outdir, 'output.txt'), 'w')
+        self.outfile = codecs.open(path.join(self.outdir, 'output.txt'),
+                                   'w', encoding='utf-8')
         self.outfile.write('''\
 Results of doctest builder run on %s
 ==================================%s
@@ -232,8 +234,12 @@ Doctest summary
                 return isinstance(node, (nodes.literal_block, nodes.comment)) \
                         and node.has_key('testnodetype')
         for node in doctree.traverse(condition):
-            code = TestCode(node.has_key('test') and node['test'] or node.astext(),
-                            type=node.get('testnodetype', 'doctest'),
+            source = node.has_key('test') and node['test'] or node.astext()
+            if not source:
+                self.warn('no code/output in %s block at %s:%s' %
+                          (node.get('testnodetype', 'doctest'),
+                           self.env.doc2path(docname), node.line))
+            code = TestCode(source, type=node.get('testnodetype', 'doctest'),
                             lineno=node.line, options=node.get('options'))
             node_groups = node.get('groups', ['default'])
             if '*' in node_groups: