If you're automatically wrapping a C source file and don't know the source encoding, you could naively decode it as Latin-1. You're still faced with the problem of characters that Python doesn't allow in identifiers. For example, gcc allows "$" in C identifiers (e.g. a field named "egg$"), but Python doesn't allow this character. At least you can use getattr() to access such names. For example:

    >>> s = bytes(range(256)).decode('latin-1')
    >>> T = type('T', (), {s: 0})
    >>> t = T()
    >>> getattr(t, s)
    0