Re: Non-ASCII user names on Windows; internationalization fun

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 10:13:24PM +0200, Dirk Loss wrote:
> David Fifield wrote:
> > > home = os.path.expanduser("~").decode(sys.getfilesystemencoding())
> > Thanks for doing some research. Zenmap already uses that solution.
> [...]
> > But it doesn't work for my user with the Japanese name, unless the
> > system locale is set to Japanese.
>
> I just tested in a VM and it doesn't work for me either. Sorry, I posted  
> too quickly.
>
> Maybe you could use a ctypes based solution:
>
> import ctypes
>
> def SHGetFolderPath(nFolder, flags=0, MAX_PATH=255):
>     buf = ctypes.create_unicode_buffer(MAX_PATH)
>     ctypes.windll.shell32.SHGetFolderPathW(None, nFolder, None, flags, buf)
>     return buf.value
>
> def get_home():
>     # CSIDL_PROFILE
>     return SHGetFolderPath(40)
>
> def get_appdata():
>     # CSIDL_APPDATA
>     return SHGetFolderPath(26)
>
> For my test account (Confucius in Chinese spelling on a German Windows  
> XP installation) get_appdata() returns the following Unicode string:
>
> u'C:\\Dokumente und Einstellungen\\\u5b54\u592b\u5b50\\Anwendungsdaten'
>
> Using this string as input to the open() function, I have successfully  
> created a file in this directory. But that was only a quick test and I  
> might be wrong on this stuff as well. It's just an idea.
> And using ctypes arguably is not the prettiest solution...

Thanks. I was afraid the answer might be something like this. I agree
that it's not pretty. In an ideal world it would be hidden inside the
implementation of expanduser.

I am tempted to use this solution, because it appears to be the most
direct way to get a Unicode string of the home directory. ctypes
requires Python 2.5, and though we try to keep Zenmap compatible with
2.4, we use 2.5 to build the Windows binaries. I'll keep the current
solution for now.

> BTW: According to [1] applications should not create files or folders at  
> the profile level, so I used get_appdata() instead of get_home() in my  
> above example.
> [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb762494(VS.85).aspx

I didn't know that. Does anyone have a strong opinion as to where the
.zenmap directory should go on Windows? We've just been using
C:\Documents and Setting\user because it's the most directly analogous
to /home/user on Unix.

David Fifield

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