Non-Unicode Perforce Servers

A Perforce server can run in either Unicode or non-Unicode mode.
A new installation defaults to non-Unicode mode, and switching to Unicode mode after the server has been in use for a long time is not easy.
Set up a server for Unicode | P4 Server Administration Documentation (2025.1)

So, if you use characters outside the English alphabet, such as Korean characters,
it's generally safer to configure a new Perforce server in Unicode mode from the start.

p4python

In addition to the P4V GUI and the p4 command-line client,
Perforce provides APIs for using its features from various languages, including C/C++, C#, and Python.

P4Python is the Python API, provided as a Python wrapper around the C++ API.
Home | P4 API for Python Documentation (2025.1)

You can use this API to access p4 functionality from 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)

The Configuration That Caused the Problem

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 Issues

When files with Korean characters in their paths are uploaded to a non-Unicode server and processed with P4Python, the output can become garbled or commands can fail.

You can resolve this by specifying the encoding as shown below.

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

The official documentation only briefly explains that you should specify the encoding used to receive strings from a non-Unicode server:

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.

Another Issue

I didn't document the exact case, so I couldn't find it again,
but there were instances where commands failed even with the encoding specified.

Since the same commands worked with the p4 command-line client, I also used a wrapper that runs p4 commands.
Output-formatting options such as -Ztag make parsing the output a little less tedious.

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