convert utf-8 to latin-1?

[Uwe Mayer]

Hi,

in a PyQt application I'm writing, the user can select a filename with a
FileDialog. Then I would like to open this file. This works fine if there
are no "special symbols" in the filename, such as the german umlauts: "ÖÄÜ"

Currently I convert the returned, of what I'm pretty sure its a utf-8 string
object, to a normal string using the str() function. But then my string
contains garbage and I cannot find that file on my ext3 fs (which uses
latin-1).

So my first question is wether you *can* convert it without loosing
something and secondly: how?

Thanks for any pointers - 
Ciao
Uwe