Unicode entries on sys.path

[Thomas Heller]

I was trying to track down a bug in py2exe where the executable did
not work when it is in a directory containing japanese characters.

Then, I discovered that part of the problem is in the zipimporter that
py2exe uses, and finally I found that it didn't even work in Python
itself.

If the entry in sys.path contains normal western characters, umlauts for
example, it works fine.  But when I copied some japanese characters from
a random web page, and named a directory after that, it didn't work any
longer.

The windows command prompt is not able to print these characters,
although windows explorer has no problems showing them.

Here's the script, the subdirectory contains the file 'somemodule.py',
but importing this fails:

  import sys
  sys.path = [u'\u5b66\u6821\u30c7xx']
  print sys.path

  import somemodule

It seems that Python itself converts unicode entries in sys.path to
normal strings using windows default conversion rules - is this a
problem that I can fix by changing some regional setting on my machine?

Hm, maybe more a windows question than a python question...

Thanks,
Thomas