Fixes #2454

Summary

The stdio_client transport crashes when the spawned child process writes invalid UTF-8 bytes to stdout. The transport decodes child stdout with encoding_error_handler="strict" by default, so malformed bytes raise during TextReceiveStream iteration. That exception escapes the decoding loop and brings down the transport task group instead of surfacing the bad line as an in-stream parse error.

Asymmetry with server side

The SDK already hardened the server side for the analogous case in PR #2302 (fix: handle non-UTF-8 bytes in stdio server stdin). That change explicitly preferred:

• Replace invalid bytes with U+FFFD
• Let JSON validation fail on the malformed line
• Keep the transport alive so subsequent valid messages can still be processed

The client side was still using "strict", creating an inconsistency.

Changes

src/mcp/client/stdio.py

• Changed StdioServerParameters.encoding_error_handler default from "strict" to "replace"
• Updated docstring to explain the rationale
• Changed logger.exception to logger.warning for JSON parse failures (avoids noisy full tracebacks for expected validation errors on malformed input)
• Removed # pragma: no cover from the now-reachable exception handling path

tests/client/test_stdio.py

• Added test_stdio_client_invalid_utf8_resilience — spawns a child that writes \xff\xfe\n (invalid UTF-8) followed by a valid JSON-RPC message, then asserts:
  • First item from read stream is an Exception (JSON validation failure on the U+FFFD-replaced line)
  • Second item is a valid SessionMessage with the expected payload

Backward compatibility

• Users who explicitly set encoding_error_handler="strict" retain the old behavior
• The default change is safe: any code consuming the read stream already handles Exception items (the type signature is MemoryObjectReceiveStream[SessionMessage | Exception])
• No new dependencies