How to change file system encoding via python?

Question

>>> import sys
>>> sys.getfilesystemencoding()
\'UTF-8\'

How do I change that? I know how to change the default system encoding.<

Answer 1

There are two ways to change it:

1) (linux-only) export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF8 before launching python:

$ LC_CTYPE=C python -c 'import sys; print(sys.getfilesystemencoding())'
ANSI_X3.4-1968
$ LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 python -c 'import sys; print(sys.getfilesystemencoding())'
UTF-8

Note that LANG serves as the default value for LC_CTYPE if it is not set, while LC_ALL overrides both LC_CTYPE and LANG)

2) monkeypatching:

import sys
sys.getfilesystemencoding = lambda: 'UTF-8'

Both methods let functions like os.stat accept unicode (python2.x) strings. Otherwise those functions raise an exception when they see non-ascii symbols in the filename.