[Python-Dev] Unicode filenames (original) (raw)

Just van Rossum just@letterror.com
Mon, 10 Feb 2003 15:09:13 +0100

Walter D=F6rwald wrote:

Just van Rossum wrote: =20 > [...] > BTW. if I try to create a file with an 8-bit filename which is not > valid utf-8, I get a strange error: >=20 > >>> f =3D open("\xff", "w") > Traceback (most recent call last): > File "", line 1, in ? > IOError: invalid mode: w > >>>=20 >=20 > This exception is thrown when errno is EINVAL, which apparently can > also mean that the filename arg is bad. Not sure if we can fix this.

But when the system default encoding (i.e. sys.getdefaultencoding()) and the file system encoding are different, I'd say the filename has to be transcoded from the system default encoding to the filesystem encoding before it is used.

In most places (probably all, uness there's a bug) Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding only has relevance for unicode strings: 8-bit strings are passed to the underlying calls unaltered. So the above traceback is the result of the OS refusing to name a file "\xff", which is natural as this particular OS (OSX) uses UTF-8 as the native file system encoding and "\xff" is not valid UTF-8. (I was actually pleasantly surprised the OS actually cares ;-)

Just