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

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 11:07:05PM +0100, jah wrote:
> On 10/09/2008 21:29, David Fifield wrote:
> > The Windows I'm trying this on is on a FAT32 partition. Does anyone know
> > if using NTFS would have any change? If someone wants to try it, it's
> > pretty easy. Install the East Asian language files (under Regional and
> > Language Options in the Control Panel), create an account, and copy and
> > paste something from Wikipedia in the user name field.
>
> I tried this with Chinese on XP with NTFS.
> I didn't have nmap installed on this fresh VM and couldn't even launch
> the NSIS installer from a directory under the Chinese user's home, but
> it installed fine for that user once I'd moved the installer.
> Starting zenmap then resulted in the message you saw with kanji - so
> filesystem seems to make no difference.

Thanks for testing! So it still doesn't work, that's too bad. We're
hitting a limitation of Python. Currently we use os.path.expanduser("~"), 
decoded from the filesystem encoding, to get the user's home directory.
os.path.expanduser reads the environment variable HOME, which simply
doesn't work for users with the names we've discussed. You get back a
bunch of question marks. If someone knows a good way to get the home
directory using the Python standard library, I'm all ears.

I wonder if it would work if it was run on a Japanese or Chinese edition
of Windows. I get the impression that the encoding Windows uses for file
names depends on the locale. If that's the case it's not such a big
problem, as people with user names like that are more likely to use an
operating system specific to their language.

David Fifield

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