bittornado / wxpython string decoding error

Binary package hint: bittornado

Greetings

The interaction between the choose-file dialog from wxpython and bittornado's btdownloadgui.py seems to have a bug.

Some version information:

bittornado: 0.3.15-2ubuntu1 (bug also confirmed on 0.3.17 from original provider)
python-wxgtk2.6: 2.6.3.2.1.5
libwxgtk2.6-0: 2.6.3.2.1.5

How to reproduce:

* Find a torrent that saves to a directory where the directory's name includes an umlauted 'U'. For instance, on mininova.org, search for "neubauten" and grab one of the umlauted Einsturzende Neubauten's torrents.
* Open the torrent with btdownloadgui.bittornado.
* Select your $HOME as target area for downloading

==> Error
"UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 5: ordinal not in range (128)"

The Traceback leads to line 2018, in on ChooseFile, 'if d2 == default'

Other Information:

default's type is a string, while d2, which comes from the Wx File Dialog, is a unicode object. I tried to get wxpython to use ascii encoding with wx.SetDefaultPyEncoding but only met exceptions, and tried to use wxversion to switch to wxpython in ascii mode, but that didn't help either.

A Workaround:

use --saveas $HOME to prevent the WX File Dialog interaction completely. However, this leads to strange windowing behavior; the titlebar of the main window has no text and nothing happens when you press on "Details". (should I submit another bug, or is this sufficient?)