Question

I’ve been working on a python script to open up a file with a unicode name (Japanese mostly) and save to a randomly generated (Non-unicode) filename in Windows Vista 64-bit, and I’m having issues… It just doesn’t work, it works fine with non-unicode filenames (Even if it has unicode content), but the second you try to pass a unicode filename in – it doesn’t work.

Here’s the code:

try:
    import sys, os
    inpath = sys.argv[1]
    outpath = sys.argv[2]
    filein = open(inpath, "rb")
    contents = filein.read()
    fileSave = open(outpath, "wb")
    fileSave.write(contents)
    fileSave.close()

    testfile = open(outpath + '.test', 'wb')
    testfile.write(inpath)
    testfile.close()

except:
    errlog = open('G:\\log.txt', 'w')
    errlog.write(str(sys.exc_info()))
    errlog.close()

And the error:

(<type 'exceptions.IOError'>, IOError(2, 'No such file or directory'), <traceback object at 0x01092A30>)

Answer 1

You have to convert your inpath to unicode, like this:

inpath = sys.argv[1]
inpath = inpath.decode("UTF-8")
filein = open(inpath, "rb")

I’m guessing you are using Python 2.6, because in Python 3, all strings are unicode by default, so this problem wouldn’t happen.