os.path.exists and unicode filenames

[Peter Bienstman]

Hi,

I'm trying to add support for unicode file names to my application.

I'm running into problems with e.g. the os.path.exists routine, which
complains if it gets passed a unicode string:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mnemosyne/pyqt_ui/main_dlg.py", line
149, in fileNew
if os.path.exists(out):
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/posixpath.py", line 171, in exists
st = os.stat(path)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 24-29:
ordinal not in range(128)

I could try encoding the string in utg-8, but then it wouldn't work under
Windows.

Is there an elegant cross-platform solution for this?

Thanks!

Peter

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Martin_v=2E_L=F6wis=22?=]

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 24-29:
ordinal not in range(128)

I could try encoding the string in utg-8, but then it wouldn't work under
Windows.

Is there an elegant cross-platform solution for this?

I assume you are using some Unix version here. If so, you should set up
the locale correctly. For example, if you set LANG to a UTF-8 locale
supported by your operating system, this (passing Unicode strings to
os.path.exists etc) works just fine.

Python follows the Unix convention that the locale defines how to
interpret characters, in particular for file names.

Regards,
Martin