>>> u='ule/\xd0\xad_041.xls'
>>> print u
ule/Э_041.xls
>>> u.encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<console>", line 1, in <module>
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd0 in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)