mkdtemp fails miserably on Windows if Windows user name has any non-ASCII characters, like ä or ö, in it. mkdtemp throws an encoding error.

This seems to be because the default temp dir in Windows is "c:\documents and settings\<user name>\local settings\temp". Now if the user name has non-ASCII characters ASCII decoder cannot handle it and creating temp directories won't work.

As a work around I have used the following code:

tempdir = unicode(tempfile.gettempdir(), 'mbcs')
mkdtemp(suffix='foo', dir=tempdir)

This applies for both Python 2.4 and Python 2.5.

Could you indicate where exactly what error is raised?

Here is traceback. Sorry it took so long.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "c:\util\home\xxx\xxx.py", line 350, in OnOpen
    dir = tempfile.mkdtemp(prefix=u'test')
  File "C:\python24\lib\tempfile.py", line 326, in mkdtemp
    file = _os.path.join(dir, prefix + name + suffix)
  File "c:\python24\lib\ntpath.py", line 102, in join
    path += "\\" + b
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 12: ordinal not in range(128)

Why are you using a unicode string as your temp directory prefix? Does
it raise something different if you don't?

Well, it's not me. As I stated in the problem description, Windows (2000
at least) uses path c:\documents and settings\<user name>\local
settings\temp as default temp dir, where also python tries to make temp
dirs. Now for example if user name is "niemistö", then the temp dir will
be ...\niemistö\local settings\temp, which won't work.

I'll try do test the latest versions of python soon.

I can't reproduce this problem on Windows Vista with any of the current maintainance branches of Python using the interactive prompt from the command line.