problem with special characters in filename

[fizzotti at gmail.com]

using:

Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Jul 31 2008, 17:28:52)
[GCC 4.2.3 (Ubuntu 4.2.3-2ubuntu7)] on linux2


Hello

I have two files (let's assume they are all in the same directory):

1) "a.dat" containing the single line "Sébastien.dat"
2) "Sébastien.dat" containing arbitraty data

I want to:

open "a.dat"
read in the single line ("Sébastien.dat")
copy the file described by the single line ("Sébastien.dat") to
another location with name "b.dat"

This is what I have started with:

import shutil

file = open('a.dat','r') #opens file for reading
for line in file:
    print line
    old_name = line[0:len(line)-1] #gets rid of "\n" suffix
    print old_name
shutil.copy(old_name, 'b.dat') #copies file

However I get the following error:
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'S\xc3\xa9bastien.dat'

I'm sure this has something to do with encoding and decoding UTF-8 and
Unicode or something like that, but everything I've tried has yet to
produce any favourable results.

Thanks
Dino