It's a trouble when Python raised a WindowsError, the encoding of message of the exception is always os-native-encoded. For example:

import os
os.remove('does_not_exist.file')

Well, here we get an exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
WindowsError: [Error 2] ???????????: 'does_not_exist.file'

As the language of my Windows7 is Traditional Chinese, the default error message I get is in big5 encoding (as know as CP950).

>>> try:
...     os.remove('abc.file')
... except WindowsError, value:
...     print value.args
...
(2, '\xa8t\xb2\xce\xa7\xe4\xa4\xa3\xa8\xec\xab\xfc\xa9w\xaa\xba\xc0\xc9\xae\xd7\xa1C')
>>>

As you see here, error message is not Unicode, then I will get another encoding exception when I try to print it out. Here is the issue, it can be found in Python issue list: http://bugs.python.org/issue1754

The question is, how to workaround this? How to get the native encoding of WindowsError? The version of Python I use is 2.6.

Thanks.