Python 3 OS walk unicode exception

Question

I'm using python 3.3.3 in win7 - I just want to list all the files in a network directory.

import os

for root, dirs, files in os.walk("X:\\network\\path\\foo\\bar\\baz"):
    print(root)
    print(dirs)
    print(files)

After a while of printing stuff it outputs this exception.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "program.py", line 6, in <module>
    print(files)
  File "C:\Python33\lib\encodings\cp437.py", line 19, in encode
    return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_map)[0]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2019' in position
2753: character maps to <undefined>

How do I get this to print simply? I always seem to have these unicode problems with python 3. I just want simple things be simple.

Answer 1

In Windows 7, the console doesn't properly support Unicode encodings. You need to encode your strings to cp-437:

print(root.encode("cp437", "backslashreplace").decode("cp437"))

That should remove all the characters unprintable in the DOS console and replace them with their \unnnn or \xnn equivalent.