Python (2.7) and reading Unicode argvs from the Windows command line

Question

I have been following this answer on how enable Python (2.7) to correctly receive file names from the Windows command line that have names such as 'canção.pdf' , '조선.pdf' or 'मान.pdf' .

My bat file (which is in shell:sendto ) is as follows (as advised here ):

@echo off
@chcp 65001 > nul
@set PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8
python "D:\Dropbox\Python\print_file_name.py" %1
pause

My python script at moment just tries to prints these file names:

sys.argv = win32_unicode_argv()
file_name = sys.argv[1].encode(sys.stdout.encoding)
print file_name

win32_unicode_argv() is a method described here .

Even thou I am able to print 'canção.pdf' correctly, I'm still not able to print either '조선.pdf' or 'मान.pdf' . Any advice on how to tackle this issue?

Answer 1

The file name is being received correctly. You can verify this by encoding sys.argv[1] as UTF-8 and writing it to a file (opened in binary mode) and then opening the file in a text editor that supports UTF-8.

The Windows command prompt is unable to display the characters correctly despite the 'chcp' command changing the codepage to UTF-8 because the terminal font does not contain those characters. The command prompt is unable to substitute characters from other fonts.