title: How do I read an image from a path with Unicode characters?
body: <p>I have the following code and it fails, because it cannot read the file from disk. The image is always <code>None</code>.</p>
  
  <pre><code># -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
  import cv2
  import numpy
  
  bgrImage = cv2.imread(u'D:\\ö\\handschuh.jpg')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Note: my file is already saved as UTF-8 with BOM. I verified with Notepad++.</p>
  
  <p>In Process Monitor, I see that Python is acccessing the file from a wrong path:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/FJL0f.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/FJL0f.png" alt="Process Monitor"></a></p>
  
  <p>I have read about:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10180765/open-file-with-a-unicode-filename">Open file with unicode filename</a>, which is about the <code>open()</code> function and not related to OpenCV.</li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3735553/how-do-i-read-an-image-file-using-python">How do I read an image file using Python</a>, but that's unrelated to Unicode issues.</li>
  </ul>