csv module and unicode, when or workaround?

[Chris]

hi,
to convert excel files via csv to xml or whatever I frequently use the 
csv module which is really nice for quick scripts. problem are of course 
non ascii characters like german umlauts, EURO currency symbol etc.

the current csv module cannot handle unicode the docs say, is there any 
workaround or is unicode support planned for the near future? in most 
cases support for characters in iso-8859-1(5) would be ok for my 
purposes but of course full unicode support would be great...

obviously I am not a python pro, i did not even find the py source for 
the module, it seemed to me it is a C based module?. is this also the 
reason for the unicode unawareness?

thanks
chris