this is, of course, a very important issue, that I'm not sure how to solve even after reading about the unicode in the Pydocs.  Everything seem to point to requiring a selection of an encoding before you can successfully use unicode.  Say I have argparse and it gives  me a string for an argument value.  How do I know what encoding it gave me?  Do I have to convert it?  Am I ever at risk have an ini file and  command line being different encodings?  

This is going to get really messy and involved because I cannot even have that literal u'abcdé' in to a configman source file without python rejecting the file entirely.   

How do we address this problem?