I have a form that is on a UTF-8 encoded page. When I submit the form cgi.FieldStorage converts any non-ascii character to an odd format. For example if I submit the value c. The browser will send %c4%87. I want to convert that to the string \xc4\x87. However, cgi.FieldStorage is converting it to \\xc4\\x87. post = cgi.FieldStorage(fp=env['wsgi.input'], environ=env, keep_blank_values=True) Python 2.6 on Ubuntu 9.10SE, Apache2, mod_wsgi.