Convert python filenames to unicode

Question

I am on python 2.6 for Windows.

I use os.walk to read a file tree. Files may have non-7-bit characters (German \"ae\" for example) in their filenames. These are enco

Answer 1

os.walk isn't specified to always use os.listdir, but neither is it listed how Unicode is handled. However, os.listdir does say:

Changed in version 2.3: On Windows NT/2k/XP and Unix, if path is a Unicode object, the result will be a list of Unicode objects. Undecodable filenames will still be returned as string objects.

Does simply using a Unicode argument work for you?

for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(u"."):
  print dirpath
  for fn in filenames:
    print "   ", fn