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

Adam Olsen rhamph at gmail.com
Fri Dec 5 04:47:22 CET 2008

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 8:24 PM, Dino Viehland <dinov at microsoft.com> wrote:

Does anyone know what Mono does here? Presumably they have the exact same problem as all strings in .NET are Unicode, and filenames/env vars/etc... are always strings.

Maybe if it's gotta be broken at least it can be broken in a manner that's consistent with others :)

Many of the windows APIs use UTF-16 without validating it. They'll pass through invalid strings until they hit something that does validate, at which point it'll blow up.

I suspect that it doesn't happen very often in practice, as having only one encoding makes it quite clear that it's a broken file name, not a mixed encoding environment.

-- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list