Printing Filenames with non-Ascii-Characters

[Serge Orlov]

Marian Aldenhövel wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am very new to Python and have run into the following problem. If I
do
> something like
>
>    dir = os.listdir(somepath)
>    for d in dir:
>       print d
>
> The program fails for filenames that contain non-ascii characters.
>
>    'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 33-34:
>
> I have noticed that this seems to be a very common problem. I have
read a lot
> of postings regarding it but not really found a solution. Is there a
simple
> one?

No :) You're trying to deal with legacy terminals, you can't reliably
print unicode characters across various terminals. It's not really
Python's fault.

>
> What I specifically do not understand is why Python wants to
interpret the
> string as ASCII at all. Where is this setting hidden?

http://www.python.org/moin/PrintFails Let me know if it's not clear. It
would be great if other people fixed/improved this page.

> I am running Python 2.3.4 on Windows XP and I want to run the program
on
> Debian sarge later.

You need cross platform terminal that supports unicode output.
Sergey.