How to use psutil.Popen with unicode commands on Python 2

Question

Hey I'm trying to execute the following command (using psutil.Popen with python 2.7):

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE" "C:\docs\ת.xlsm"

Using this code:

dir = u"C:\\docs"
doc = os.listdir(dir)[0]
full_path = os.path.join(dir, doc)
command = u"\"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Office\\root\\Office16\\EXCEL.EXE\" \"{}\"".format(full_path)
process = psutil.Popen(command)

But I'm getting this exception:

    process = psutil.Popen(command)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\psutil\__init__.py", line 1370, in __init__
    self.__subproc = subprocess.Popen(*args, **kwargs)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\subprocess.py", line 390, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "C:\Python27\lib\subprocess.py", line 640, in _execute_child
    startupinfo)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u05ea' in position 102: ordinal not in range(128)

I have found this related question: subprocess.Popen with a unicode path . But every given answer there doesn't work for me.

Using subprocess.Popen(command.encode(locale.getpreferredencoding())) , throws the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "scanner_watcher.py", line 53, in _execute
    self.scanner.execute(path)
  File "scanner_watcher.py", line 356, in execute
    self._execute(file_path)
  File "scanner_watcher.py", line 201, in _execute
    self.open_scanner(file_path, file_package)
  File "scanner_watcher.py", line 287, in open_scanner
    self.scanner_process = psutil.Popen(command.encode(locale.getpreferredencoding()))
  File "C:\Python27\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 12, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,errors,encoding_table)
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character u'\u05ea' in position 102: character maps to <undefined>

Using path.encode('mbcs') turns all the Unicode characters into question marks.

I don't want to use os.startfile because I need to use different commands on the program and then handle the opened process (when the os.startfile doesn't allow that).

I've found this modified Popen: https://gist.github.com/vaab/2ad7051fc193167f15f85ef573e54eb9 But this code was not thoroughly tested.

Is there a correct way to use Popen with a Unicode command in python 2.7?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The issue is your use of double-quotes when defining command . The way it's written splits the statement into multiple strings in all the wrong places. Substituting single-quotes for the first and final quotes (open and close of string) fixed the issue for me.

command = u'\\"C:\\\\Program Files (x86)\\\\Microsoft Office\\\\root\\\\Office16\\\\EXCEL.EXE\\" \\"{}\\"'.format(full_path)