gistfile1.txt

diff --git a/magic.py b/magic.py
index cd5ff24..10685ac 100644
--- a/magic.py
+++ b/magic.py
@@ -193,14 +193,15 @@ def coerce_filename(filename):
         return None
 
     # ctypes will implicitly convert unicode strings to bytes with
-    # .encode('ascii').  A more useful default here is
-    # getfilesystemencoding().  We need to leave byte-str unchanged.
+    # .encode('ascii').  If you use the filesystem encoding 
+    # then you'll get inconsistent behavior (crashes) depending on the user's
+    # LANG environment variable
     is_unicode = (sys.version_info[0] <= 2 and
                   isinstance(filename, unicode)) or \
                   (sys.version_info[0] >= 3 and
                    isinstance(filename, str))
     if is_unicode:
-        return filename.encode(sys.getfilesystemencoding())
+        return filename.encode('utf-8')
     else:
         return filename