newbie question about compression and ascii

[Haim Ashkenazi]

Serge Orlov wrote:

> 
> "Haim Ashkenazi" <haim at babysnakes.org> wrote in message
> news:mailman.470.1074442222.12720.python-list at python.org...
>> Hi
>>
>> I'm a real newbie, so sorry if this is a trivial question.
>>
>> I'm writing a script that collect a list of files and creates a zipfile
>> from these files. when running it on linux everything works fine, but
>> when I'm running it on windows I get this error when running the command:
>>
>> myZip.write(file)
>>
>> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xa8 in position 10:
>> ordinal not in range(128)
>>
>> the file variable contains: u'C:\\Document and Settings\\haim\etc...'.
> 
> A unicode file name... Zip format doesn't support unicode file names.
> 
>>
>> is there a way to solve this?
> 
> Only work around. Encode the unicode string using an encoding
> of your choice. For windows it's probably "mbcs":
> if isinstance(file_name, unicode):
>     myZip.write(file_name.encode('mbcs'))
thanx, this seem to solve the problem. 

Bye

> 
> -- Serge.

--
Haim