IPython/utils/path.py: Sometimes this system encoding just won't work. So, we try to use it if we can, but fallback to UTF8 if it simply won't work.

IPython/utils/path.py

@@ -441,8 +441,12 b' def ensure_dir_exists(path, mode=0o755):'
     try:
         path_exists = os.path.exists(path)
     except UnicodeEncodeError:
-        path = path.encode(sys.getfilesystemencoding() or "utf8")
-        path_exists = os.path.exists(path)
+        try:
+            path = path.encode(sys.getfilesystemencoding() or "utf8")
+            path_exists = os.path.exists(path)
+        except UnicodeEncodeError:
+            path = path.encode("utf8")
+            path_exists = os.path.exists(path)
 
     if not os.path.exists(path):
         try: