[Python-Dev] Python-3.0, unicode, and os.environ (original) (raw)

Adam Olsen rhamph at gmail.com
Thu Dec 4 22:40:05 CET 2008

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 2:19 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

The bug report I opened suggests creating a PEP to address this issue. I think that's a good idea for whether os.listdir() and friends should be changed to raise an exception but not having any way to get at some environment variables seems like it's just a bug that needs to be addressed. What do other people think on both these issues? I'm pretty sure the discussion on this topic a while back decided that where necessary Python 3 would grow parallel bytes versions of APIs affected by environmental encoding issues (such as os.environb, os.listdirb, os.getcwdb), but that we were OK with the idea of deferring addition of those APIs until 3.1.

It looks like most of them got into 3.0. http://docs.python.org/3.0/library/os.html says "All functions accepting path or file names accept both bytes and string objects, and result in an object of the same type, if a path or file name is returned."

That is, this was an acknowledged limitation with a fairly straightforward agreed solution, but it wasn't considered a common enough issue to delay the release of 3.0 until all of those parallel APIs had been implemented

Aye. IMO it's fairly clear that os.getenv()/os.putenv() should follow suit in 3.1. I'm not so sure about adding os.environb (and making subprocess use it), unless the OP can demonstrate they really need it.

-- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list