How to work with libraries that don't support unicode characters
<p>In my case, I recently picked up the <a href="http://www.ambiera.com/irrklang/" rel="nofollow">irrKlang</a> library which allows me to work with audio files without doing too much work. Then I ran into the issue where unicode characters in filepaths were not supported by the library. It either reads it incorrectly (I would've thought even if it was read wrong, it could still find the file), or simply ignores it, leaving me with invalid file paths.</p>

<p>Searched their support forums for a solution to this, but all I got out of it was "unicode? uhhh why not just use ascii?" kind of attitude towards unicode, which I suppose is not uncommon.</p>

<p>What are some techniques that I could use to reliably pass unicode strings to  libraries that don't have unicode support?</p>
