os.path.expanduser on Windows: UnicodeEncodeError

[Neil Hodgson]

Bob Swerdlow wrote:
> My application is getting this error on Windows XP (works fine on Mac OS 
> X) when it calls os.path.expanduser:
>    UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 
> 52-56: ordinal not in range(128)

    What does your environment look like? You can find out by typing 
"SET" at a command prompt. The settings used are HOME, HOMEPATH and 
HOMEDRIVE. Also helpful to print out the value being handed to 
os.path.expanduser.

> I found referenes to Path 957650, but I'm not familiar with how such 
> fixes are processed.  Is there a patch I can add to fix this?  How do I 
> know what version of Python it is fixed in - that is, will upgrading to 
> Python 2.3.5 fix this?

    The patch is still "Status: Open" so hasn't been applied to a 
release. It is not certain that this will fix your problem. The main 
benefit of the patch appears to be IMO that it will use the standard 
USERPROFILE environment variable.

    Neil