How do I display unicode-paths?

[Pettersen, Bjorn S]

I've been trying to stay blissfully unaware of Unicode, however now it seems like it's my turn. From the outside it seems like a rather massive subject, so any pointers as to where I should _start_ reading would be appreciated. The usecase is a class:

  class path(object):
     ...
     def __str__(self):
        return self.pathstr.encode(???)

the question is what to put at ??? to be most useful to programmers/end users?

Background: I've got a directory with a file called 'bæ', B-AE, (which everyone knows is what Norwegian sheep say :-). If I type u'bæ' at the Python command prompt, it returns:

  u'b\x91'

(WinXP, 2.3.2, regular command window). With a little trial and error I found:

  >>> print u'b\x91'.encode('latin1')
  bæ

although

  >>> print u'b\x91'
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
    File "e:\python23\lib\encodings\cp437.py", line 18, in encode
      return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_map)
  UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u91' in position 1:
   character maps to <undefined>

not sure I'm understanding this, and when I call:

  os.listdir(os.getcwdu())

I get back

  u'b\xe6'

which isn't making much sense either...

help?!

-- bjorn