Surrogate escaping has been part of Python since 3.2 or so which pretty much solved this. Python's behaviour is only problematic when all of the below is true:

Surrogate escaping has been part of Python since 3.2 or so which pretty much solved this. Python's behaviour is only problematic when all of the below is true: - Running on Linux and, - using glibc and, - glibc's locale files were deleted or the locale is otherwise not configured and, - you try to read/write non-ASCII file names. (In this scenario Python falls back to the only locale it can process by itself, which is 7-bit ASCII -- the problem is not ASCII, rather the 7-bit restriction. I believe there is a bug open that suggests changing this fallback to UTF-8, which would solve this problem.). The only time I saw that was with rear which did all of the above on purpose to save like 5 MB on the generated images. In all other cases there is no problem with any kind of file name. Note that this is a severely broken system configuration where a lot of other stuff falls apart as well.