I just took a look as the 3.2 tarfile code and see that it always (because self.name is always unicode) does the same encoding, with 'replace', referencing RFC1952. Although there are a few other differences, they appear inconsequential, so that the code otherwise should behave the same. Reading further on codec error handling, I gather that my previously understanding was off; non-Latin1 chars will just all appear as '?' instead of raising an exception. While that is normally useless, it does not matter since the result is not used. So I agree to call this fixed.