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Decoding an Unicode string doesn't make any sense :-) Moreover, you have to specify the encoding. The default encoding is ASCII, whereas the question here is if the string can be encoded to sys.getfilesystemencoding().

I propose:

fs_encoding = getfilesystemencoding()
try:
filename.encode(fs_encoding)
except UnicodeEncodeError:
self.skipTest("filename %r cannot be encoded to the filesystem encoding %r" % (filename, fs_encoding))

It would provide better skip message to check if the test is skipped for good reasons, or not ;-)