non standard path characters

A kind user reports having problems running the reportlab tests because his path has non-ascii characters in it eg

......\Mes documents\Mes Téléchargements\Firefox\...

somewhere in the tests we look at the path and then try and convert to utf8 for display in pdf.

Is there a standard way to do these path string conversions?

Paths appear to come from all sorts of places and given the increasing use of zip file packaging it doesn't seem appropriate to rely on the current platform as a single choice for the default encoding.
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Robin Becker

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