Problems with signs like "ß", "ä" etc (filenames like Weißstorch.shp)

Question

I get the following error with the this script because of the ß in filename: Weißstorch.shp. Any ideas how to solve this? Python 2.7.10 # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- import os, time, xlwt import xlrd from xlrd import open_workbook myPath = r"R:\Daten\geo_daten\Arten\2015_SIC\LUBW_Weissstorch_Horststandorte" SHPCounter = 0 MyList = list() Zusammengef = r"C: emp_Geodatenverzeichnis\Nutzung.xls" for path, dirs, files in os.walk(myPath): for file in files: if file.lower().endswith('.shp'): print path + "\" + file SHPCounter += 1 print SHPCounter accessTime = os.path.getatime(os.path.join(path, file)) # last access time actualTime = time.time() MyList.append(path + "\" + file + "___" + file + "___" + ("""{} """.format(int((actualTime - accessTime)/3600)))) # Write in excel data = [] for line in MyList: data.append([word for word in line.split("___") if word]) print data wb = xlwt.Workbook() sheet = wb.add_sheet("NichtGenutzt") for row_index in range(len(data)): for col_index in range(len(data[row_index])): sheet.write(row_index, col_index, data[row_index][col_index]) wb.save(Zusammengef)‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍ Error Message and print statements: R:\Daten\geo_daten\Arten\2015_SIC\LUBW_Weissstorch_Horststandorte\LUBW_Weißstorch_Horststandorte_E.shp 1 [['R:\Daten\geo_daten\Arten\2015_SIC\LUBW_Weissstorch_Horststandorte\LUBW_Wei\xdfstorch_Horststandorte_E.shp', 'LUBW_Wei\xdfstorch_Horststandorte_E.shp', '1551 ']] UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xdf in position 74: ordinal not in range(128)

JB1234510 · Accepted Answer

You have to decode the filename first to get it to run and write the filenames to the list.