@a.badger: The behaviour (drop non encodable strings) is not really a
problem if you configure correctly your program and computer. Eg. you
spoke about CGI-WSGI: if your website also speak UTF-8, you will be
able to read all environment variables. So this issue is not
important, it only appears when your website/OS is not well
configured. I mean the problem is not in Python but outside Python.
The PATH variable contains directory names, if you have only names
encodable in your filesystem encoding (UTF-8 most of the time), you
will be able to use the PATH variable. If a directory has an non
decodable name, rename the directory but don't try to fix Python!