You will find this post useful if 1. You are on Windows 2. You are using Python 3.0 or above 3. You are having problems with os.walk or os.listdir because some of your filenames are encoding in Unicode While using os.walk, you encounter and error similar to the one below. File "C:\Python32\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 '\u2013' in position 226: character maps to What would have gotten you going in Python 2.7 but will not work in Python 3.0: rootdir = ru'D:\COUNTRY\ROADS\' for (root, dirname, filename) in os.walk(rootdir): You will be irreverently pointed out a Syntax error. What will work (or to be more precise, worked on my system !): rootdir = r'D:\COUNTRY\ROADS\' for (root, dirname, filename) in os.walk(rootdir.encode('utf-8')): # do your stuff here Useful links: If you are on Python 2.6
My run-ins with technology. In the lab, on the bus, after sunset, under the AGP bridge.