Fix special carachters like latin-1
accented_string = u'Málaga'
# accented_string is of type 'unicode'
import unidecode
unaccented_string = unidecode.unidecode(accented_string)
# unaccented_string contains 'Malaga'and is of type 'str'
Python os methods returns string if you give a string as input and a unicode if you use unicode as input.
Like os.listdir('PATH') will return string
Like os.listdir(u'PATH') will return unicode
Like os.listdir(unicode('PATH')) will return unicode