non standard path characters

[Robin Becker]

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.
-- 
Robin Becker