newbie question about compression and ascii

[Serge Orlov]

"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'))

-- Serge.