Special characters in path cause error

[bmcrae]

Special characters in can cause errors without an informative error message.

For example, one user had an accent mark in her output path (included the word 'Tânia'), and this produced the following error:
File "PythonCard\widget.pyc", line 408, in _dispatch
File "circuitscape\gui.pyc", line 443, in on_calc_Button_mouseClick
File "circuitscape\cfg.pyc", line 164, in write
File "ConfigParser.pyc", line 412, in write
UnicodeEncodeError: "ascii" codec can't encode character u'\xe2' in position 20:
ordinal not in range(128)

Having an error message that suggests a path without special characters would be helpful in cases like this.

[tanmaykm]

Python ConfigParser not able to handle unicode?
Or may be there is some coercion of a unicode string to ascii happening somewhere.