How do I obtain the filenames' encoding after os.listdir?

Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz gradha at titanium.sabren.com
Wed Jun 4 05:50:03 EDT 2003


Hi.

I'm using os.listdir() to read a directory. The function returns
a list of string objects:

In [3]: l = os.listdir(".")
In [7]: l[6]
Out[7]: 'm\xfasica.mid'
In [8]: l[6].decode("latin1")
Out[8]: u'm\xfasica.mid'

I want to transform the strings to unicode objects so I can use them
with pygtk, and the current process works ok for my machine. The
question is how do I know the encoding of the filenames?  Currently
I'm presuming latin1, but if somebody else uses a different encoding,
how do I know which one?

The documentation says string.decode can use as parameter "ignore"
or "replace", but using them only raises LookupErrors.

-- 
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