Retrive unicode keys from the registry

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Thomas Heller wrote:

> My understanding is that it's possible to convert any (for a certain
> definition of 'any) unicode string in a byte string (because the
> encoding for the byte string can be specified), but that it's impossible
> to convert a byte string into unicode unless the byte string's encoding
> is known.
> 
> Maybe this only shows my un-understanding of unicode...

It certainly is. It is possible to create a registry key which the
"ANSI" API (RegQueryValueExA) cannot find - i.e. where you truly
need the "wide" API (RegQueryValueExW).

An example would be a registry key with Cyrillic, Greek, or Japanese
characters on your system. Encoding them as "mbcs" will convert those
characters into question marks (which is a bug in itself - Python
should rasise an exception instead).

Regards,
Martin