On 22 December 2011 13:15, STINNER Victor <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
> You cannot pass directly "h\xe9.txt", but if you know the "correct" file system encoding, you can encode it explicitly using str.encode("utf-8").

My recollection was that there were some cases where you couldn't do
this, but perhaps I was wrong or perhaps they're all fixed in
python3.x, or at least perhaps they are better fixed as individual
bugs.  gz may know more.

> You are trying to do something complex (add hacks for filenames, for a specific configuration) for a simple problem: configure correctly locales.

I think you may be right.

> If you know and you are sure that your are using UTF-8, why not
> simply setting your locale to a UTF-8 locale?

_My_ locale is set properly.  The problem is all the other people in
the world who do not have their locale set to match their files on
disk; telling them each to fix it is tedious.  But perhaps the OS is
the best place to address that, when the incorrect locale is just
accidental not unavoidable.