sys.executable returns garbage on some non-english systems

[apple1417]

We've occasionally seen some people having issues running the bl2 mod menu, which boil down to sys.executable holding a garbage value. Often this contains another random filename, but sometimes it's just random garbage data. Interestingly, os.path.dirname(sys.executable) returns a few garbage bytes, followed by the actual path. This does not apply to the executable path we extract within the sdk, that always returns correctly.

In a few recent cases where we managed a bit more debugging, a common thread was that everyone originally had their system language set to Russian. Presumably, python is sourcing some cp1251-encoded value, but interpreting it incorrectly?

[apple1417]

Just had another user with the same issue, this time on a French system, which should be using cp1252. Additionally, after testing workarounds on a number of users, we've seen the issue happens multiple times even when paths are all ASCII. This means encoding issues are probably not the cause.

From this testing, a workaround appears to be:

os.path.dirname(re.split(r"\\[A-Z]:\\", os.path.abspath(sys.executable))[0])