file names longer than MAX_PATH under Windows 2003

[Tim Golden]

[Sergey]

| I try to open file with pathname length 282 bytes:
| E:\files\..................\something.dat

| [... MS advise ...] just add prefix \\?\ to file name.
| But when I try to pass prefixed name to file(), I get the 
| same result as when I don't add the prefix: file not found. 

With a file called c:\temp\test.txt, I successfully
opened and read it like this:

print open (r"\\?\C:\temp\test.txt").read ()

So the basic functionality works. I didn't
artificially generate a long path to see if
there's a problem in that direction.

But note that r prefix to the string. Is it possible
that your string didn't include it? If not, then the
backslash character which Windows uses as a separator
can be stolen by Python which sees it as an escaping
character.

TJG

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