Question

I’m running a python program on a user’s computer in Portugal, where the user’s username contains unicode characters. I would like to have os.path.expanduser('~') return something functional since I use the resulting path for some file operations, but it currently returns a python str representation of a unicode string:

>>> import os
>>> os.path.expanduser('~')
'C:\\Users\\V\xe2nia'

But this is a python string … how can I convert this to an actual unicode string that Windows will recognize as a valid filepath?

Answer 1

The function returned a byte string, not a unicode string. You need to decode it, given the encoding used for the string.

os.path.expanduser('~').decode(sys.getfilesystemencoding())

I’m making the presumption here that the encoding used was the filesystem encoding, which is avilable via sys.getfilesystemencoding(). It looks like latin-1 from here, but you can’t be certain.

You can also try to pass in a unicode path to os.path.expanduser() and have Python do the decoding for you:

os.path.expanduser(u'~')

Please read up on this and other Unicode issues in the Python Unicode HOWTO. If you don’t understand the difference between a encoded bytestring and a Unicode string, please do read this excellent article as well.