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

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Fri Dec 5 02:16:55 CET 2008

Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

I would think life would be ultimately easier if either the file server or the shell server automatically translated file names from jis and utf8 and back, so that the PATH on the *nix shell server is entirely utf8. This is not possible because no part of the computer knows what the encoding is. To the computer, it's just a sequence of bytes. Unlike xml or the windows filesystem (winfs? ntfs?) where the encoding is specified as part of the document/filesystem there's nothing to tell what encoding the filenames are in.

I thought you said that the file server keep all filenames in shift-jis, and the shell server all in utf-8. If so, then the shell server could know if it were told so.

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