Message1695

As I'm trying to explain in the comment, iso-8859-1 isn't really being used as an encoding here.  It maps java byte values, -128 to 127, into the values of a Python str stored as a string, 0-255.  It's a fixed operation having nothing to do with the local encoding.  The fact that it used the local encoding before was broken.  

You can call encode(<yourcharset>) on the returned str from this method to turn it into a unicode object with the encoding you desire.