right adjusted strings containing umlauts

[Kurt Mueller]

Am 08.08.2013 16:43, schrieb jfharden at gmail.com:
> On Thursday, 8 August 2013 15:23:46 UTC+1, Kurt Mueller  wrote:
>> I'd like to print strings right adjusted.
>> print( '>{0:>3}<'.format( 'ä' ) )
> 
> Make both strings unicode
> print( u'>{0:>3}<'.format( u'ä' ) )
> Why not use rjust for it though?
> u'ä'.rjust(3)

In real life there is a list of strings in output_list from a command like:
output_list = shlex.split( input_string, bool_cmnt, bool_posi, )
input_string is from a file, bool_* are either True or False
repr( output_list )
['\xc3\xb6', '\xc3\xbc', 'i', 's', 'f']
which should be printed right aligned.
using:
print( u'{0:>3} {1:>3} {2:>3} {3:>3} {4:>3}'.format( *output_list ) )
( In real life, the alignement and the width is variable )

How do I prepare output_list the pythonic way to be unicode strings?
What do I do, when input_strings/output_list has other codings like iso-8859-1?

TIA
-- 
Kurt Mueller