Hi, @lasselauch as a rule of thumb with Python2.7 always store data as a Unicode string.
Control your IO which means, for each, Input make sure you know the encoding in all cases by always calling .decode('utf-8') so you are sure to store a Unicode value and get an error if something went wrong at a loading time.
Then output the content according to your need some need ASCII, some can work with unicode, but do the conversion on the fly, don't touch you stored Unicode data.
For the francophone people, there is this fabulous article about unicode Encoding in Python for English I guess the best I found on this topic is A Guide to Unicode, UTF-8, and Strings in Python.
Cheers,
Maxime.