about special characters

[Terry Reedy]

On 4/30/2016 2:13 PM, Jianling Fan wrote:

> I am using python 2.7 in Windows 7 Enterprise version.
>
> Here is the the filename that cause the problem: "Decock-2013-On the
> potential of δ18O and δ15N.pdf"
> When I delete the "δ" in the filename, the script works good.

You may be able to get "δ" (and other Greek characters) to work on your 
system with 2.7, but if you want to be able to work with any filename on 
Windows, get Python 3.4 or later and use text strings, not byte strings. 
You may someday run into a Name-your-title.pdf file name with other 
'strange' characters from other

Windows filenames are unicode strings and are stored, I believe, with 
utf-16 encoding.  Even in early 3.x versions, there were Windows path 
problems, for instance with east Asian characters.  Multiple 3.x patches 
seem to have fixed the problems. So merely using unicode is not, in 
general, sufficient.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy