I'm having trouble reading special characters from stdin. Here are my attempts: import os dir = raw_input("Dir name: ") Dir name: c:/á os.chdir(dir) WindowsError: [Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified: 'c:/\x81\xe1' Ok, so I tried to get the default system encoding and recode the string from stdin: import locale encoding = locale.getdefaultlocale()[1] print encoding cp1252 unicode(dir, encoding) Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "c:\Python26\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 15, in decode return codecs.charmap_decode(input,errors,decoding_table) UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x81 in position 3: character maps to <undefined> Now, I don't know how to solve this. Nor can I understand - why is there a problem when I try to access a directory with a name written in the system default encoding itself??