right adjusted strings containing umlauts

[Kurt Mueller]

Now I have this small example:
----------------------------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/env python
# vim: set fileencoding=utf-8 :

from __future__ import print_function
import sys, shlex

print( repr( sys.stdin.encoding ) )

strg_form = u'{0:>3} {1:>3} {2:>3} {3:>3} {4:>3}'
for inpt_line in sys.stdin:
    proc_line = shlex.split( inpt_line, False, True, )
    encoding = "utf-8"
    proc_line = [ strg.decode( encoding ) for strg in proc_line ]
    print( strg_form.format( *proc_line ) )
----------------------------------------------------------

$ echo -e "a b c d e\na ö u 1 2" | file -
/dev/stdin: UTF-8 Unicode text
$ echo -e "a b c d e\na ö u 1 2" | ./align_compact.py
None
  a   b   c   d   e
  a   ö   u   1   2
$ echo -e "a b c d e\na ö u 1 2" | recode utf8..latin9 | file -
/dev/stdin: ISO-8859 text
$ echo -e "a b c d e\na ö u 1 2" | recode utf8..latin9 | ./align_compact.py
None
  a   b   c   d   e
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./align_compact.py", line 13, in <module>
    proc_line = [ strg.decode( encoding ) for strg in proc_line ]
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/encodings/utf_8.py", line 16, in decode
    return codecs.utf_8_decode(input, errors, True)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf6 in position 0: invalid start byte
muk at mcp20:/sw/prog/scripts/text_manip>

How do I handle this two inputs?


TIA
-- 
Kurt Mueller