Non-Unicode Perforce

Perforce servers can be configured to operate in either Unicode or Non-Unicode mode. By default, they are set to Non-Unicode mode upon installation, and changing to Unicode mode after a long period of operation can be quite challenging. You can refer to the Set up a server for Unicode | P4 Server Administration Documentation (2025.1) for more details.

Therefore, when using characters outside of English, such as Korean, it's generally more convenient to set up Perforce in Unicode mode from the beginning.

P4Python

In addition to the GUI environment P4V and the command-line interface P4, Perforce provides APIs for various programming languages such as C/C++, C#, and Python.

Among these, P4Python is the Python API that wraps the C++ API for use in Python. You can find more information in the Home | P4 API for Python Documentation (2025.1).

Using this API, you can utilize P4 functionalities in Python as shown below:

from P4 import P4, P4Exception  
  
p4 = P4()  
  
p4.port = "127.0.0.1:1666"  
p4.user = "HAPPY"  
p4.client = "HAPPY_test"
  
try:  
    p4.connect()  
    result = p4.run("fstat", "//...")  
    print(result)  
    p4.disconnect()  
except P4Exception:  
    for e in p4.errors:  
        print(e)

Problematic Configuration

Server

OS: Windows Server
Locale: ko; Korean (Unicode UTF-8 support disabled)
Non-Unicode mode

Client

OS: Windows 10
Locale: ko; Korean (Unicode UTF-8 support disabled)

Encoding Issue

When uploading files with Korean paths to a Non-Unicode server and processing them with P4Python, the resulting encoding may be corrupted, or the command may fail.

In such cases, you can specify the encoding to resolve the issue as follows:

p4 = P4()  
p4.port = "127.0.0.1:1666"  
p4.user = "HAPPY"  
p4.client = "HAPPY_test"  
p4.encoding = 'cp949'        # Specify encoding

The official documentation briefly explains that you should specify the encoding for receiving strings from a Non-Unicode server as follows:

encoding

Encoding to use when receiving strings from a non-Unicode server. If unset, use UTF8.
Can be set to a legal Python encoding, or to `raw` to receive Python bytes instead of Unicode strings. Requires Python 3.

Additional Issues

Although I did not keep a record of specific cases, there were instances where commands failed even when the encoding was specified.

Since there were no issues with the command-line tool P4, I also adopted a method of wrapping P4 command execution. Using P4's output formatting options (like -Ztag) makes parsing the output a bit less cumbersome.

Formatting P4 command output using the -F global option with examples