[ python-Bugs-1759845 ] subprocess.call fails with unicode strings in command line

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Bugs item #1759845, was opened at 2007-07-25 04:24
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by brotch
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Category: Python Library
Group: Python 2.5
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Matt (mclausch)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: subprocess.call fails with unicode strings in command line

Initial Comment:
On Windows, subprocess.call() fails with an exception if either the executable or any of the arguments contain upper level characters. See below:

>>> cmd = [ u'test_\xc5_exec.bat', u'arg1', u'arg2' ]
>>> subprocess.call(cmd)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "C:\Python25\lib\subprocess.py", line 443, in call
    return Popen(*popenargs, **kwargs).wait()
  File "C:\Python25\lib\subprocess.py", line 593, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "C:\Python25\lib\subprocess.py", line 815, in _execute_child
    startupinfo)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xc5' in position 5: ordinal not in range(128)


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Comment By: brotchie (brotch)
Date: 2007-08-05 18:36

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=1860608
Originator: NO

Python's default character coding is 'ascii' which can't convert unicode >
127 into chars.

Forcing the unicode string to encode as 'iso-8859-1' 

eg.
subprocess.call(cmd.encode('iso-8859-1')) 

resolves the problem and runs the correct command.

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