unicode codecs

[Ivan Voras]

When concatenating strings (actually, a constant and a string...) i get 
the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xfc in position 1: 
ordinal not in range(128)

Now I don't think either string is unicode, but I'm working with 
win32api so it might be... :) The point is: I know all values will fit 
in a particular code page (iso-8859-2), so how do I change the 'ascii' 
codec in the above error into something that will work?