How To Workaround Python "windowserror Messages Are Not Properly Encoded" Problem?

It's a trouble when Python raised a WindowsError, the encoding of message of the exception is always os-native-encoded. For example: import os os.remove('does_not_exist.file') We

Solution 1:

We have the same problem in Russian version of MS Windows: the code page of the default locale is cp1251, but the default code page of the Windows console is cp866:

>>>import sys>>>print sys.stdout.encoding
cp866
>>>import locale>>>print locale.getdefaultlocale()
('ru_RU', 'cp1251')

The solution should be to decode the Windows message with default locale encoding:

>>>try:...    os.remove('abc.file')...except WindowsError, err:...print err.args[1].decode(locale.getdefaultlocale()[1])...

The bad news is that you still can't use exc_info=True in logging.error().

Solution 2:

sys.getfilesystemencoding() should help.

import os, sys
try:
    os.delete('nosuchfile.txt')
except WindowsError, ex:
    enc = sys.getfilesystemencoding()
    print (u"%s: %s" % (ex.strerror, ex.filename.decode(enc))).encode(enc)

For other purposes than printing to console you may want to change final encoding to 'utf-8'

Solution 3:

That is just the repr() string of the same error message. Since your console already supports cp950, just print the component you want. This works on my system after reconfiguring to use cp950 in my console. I had to explicitly raise the error message since my system is English and not Chinese:

>>>try:...raise WindowsError(2,'系統找不到指定的檔案。')...except WindowsError, value:...print value.args...
(2, '\xa8t\xb2\xce\xa7\xe4\xa4\xa3\xa8\xec\xab\xfc\xa9w\xaa\xba\xc0\xc9\xae\xd7\xa1C')
>>>try:...raise WindowsError(2,'系統找不到指定的檔案。')...except WindowsError, value:...print value.args[1]...
系統找不到指定的檔案。

Alternatively, use Python 3.X. It prints repr() using the console encoding. Here's an example:

Python 2.6.5 (r265:79096, Mar 192010, 21:48:26) [MSC v.150032 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type"help", "copyright", "credits"or"license"for more information.
>>> '系統找不到指定的檔案。''\xa8t\xb2\xce\xa7\xe4\xa4\xa3\xa8\xec\xab\xfc\xa9w\xaa\xba\xc0\xc9\xae\xd7\xa1C'

Python 3.1.2 (r312:79149, Mar 212010, 00:41:52) [MSC v.150032 bit (Intel)] on win32
Type"help", "copyright", "credits"or"license"for more information.
>>> '系統找不到指定的檔案。''系統找不到指定的檔案。'