[Python-Dev] Adding the 'path' module (was Re: Some RFE for review) (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum gvanrossum at gmail.com
Mon Jul 4 09:44:09 CEST 2005

Guido van Rossum: > Then maybe the code that handles Unicode paths in arguments should be > fixed rather than adding a module that encapsulates a work-around...

On 7/3/05, Neil Hodgson <nyamatongwe at gmail.com> wrote:

It isn't clear whether you are saying this should be fixed by the user or in the library.

I meant the library.

For a quick example, say someone wrote some code for counting lines in a directory: [deleted]

Ah, sigh. I didn't know that os.listdir() behaves differently when the argument is Unicode. Does os.listdir(".") really behave differently than os.listdir(u".")? Bah! I don't think that's a very good design (although I see where it comes from). Promoting only those entries that need it seems the right solution -- user code that can't deal with the Unicode entries shouldn't be used around directories containing unicode -- if it needs to work around unicode it should be fixed to support that! Mapping Unicode names to "?????" seems the wrong behavior (and doesn't work very well once you try to do anything with those names except for printing).

Face it. Unicode stinks (from the programmer's POV). But we'll have to live with it. In Python 3.0 I want str and unicode to be the same data type (like String in Java) and I want a separate data type to hold a byte array.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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