On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 8:13 AM, Albert-Jan Roskam <fo...@yahoo.com> wrote: > >In windows xp, the characters can, apparently, not be represented >in this encoding called 'mbcs'.
MBCS (multibyte character set) refers to the locale encoding on Windows. CPython encodes to MBCS via the Win32 function WideCharToMultiByte, with the CP_ACP code page (i.e. the system default 'ANSI' encoding): unicodeobject.c, encode_mbcs (3877-3884): http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/8803c3d61da2/Objects/unicodeobject.c#l3843 WideCharToMultiByte: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd374130 MBCS could be a double byte encoding such as code page 936 (simplified Chinese): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/goglobal/cc305153 But generally if you're in the West it'll be Windows 1252: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252 The Windows API, registry, and NT file system use UTF-16, with support for legacy code pages. System calls that end in W are the (W)ide interface. Calls that end in "A" are the ANSI wrappers. For example, Kernel32 has both CreateFileW (UTF-16) and CreateFileA (ANSI). In C, one uses CreateFile without the suffix; it depends on preprocessor definitions. With ctypes you'd likely use windll.kernel32.CreatFileW with "utf-16le" or "utf-16be" encoded arguments. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org To unsubscribe or change subscription options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
