Not that I, uhm, wrote that and didnвЂ™t notice it at firstвЂ¦ I finally had to do this:ДЇilename = codecs.escape_decode(fields)ДЄnd, whatever you do, donвЂ™t accidentally write if filetype = 'file' - that will silently always evaluate to False, because 'file' tests different than b'file'. That second link had a mention of an undocumented function, codecs.escape_decode, which does it right. Even the regular expression solution on that page doesnвЂ™t work.

Many wrong answers вЂ“ youвЂ™ll get an encoding error for certain values.

I thought this should be easy in Python, eh? I recently was processing data generated by mtree, which uses octal escapes for special characters in filenames. WhatвЂ™s the chances that all Python programs do this correctly? Yeah. For a Python program to properly support all valid Unix filenames, it must use вЂњbytesвЂќ instead of strings, which has all sorts of annoying implications. But you start getting encoding errors from Python trying to do things like store filenames in strings.

I was recently dealing with data from 20 years ago, before UTF-8 was a filename standard. Only that causes an error these days.Д«ut processing of filenames takes the cake. Then you have the case where the pexpect docs say to use logfile = sys.stdout to show the interaction with the virtual terminal. Gpodder, for instance, frequently exits with tracebacks due to Python errors converting podcast titles with smartquotes into ASCII. Nice idea, right?Д«ut here come the problems. Python decided to fully integrate Unicode into the language. codifying emojis.Д®mojis aside, things arenвЂ™t all so easy. And of course, these days theyвЂ™re doing the useful work ofвЂ¦. CP437 (and of course itвЂ™s even worse for non-Western languages) can attest to that. Anyone that remembers the mess of ISO-8859-* vs.

Gpodder python 3.x