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

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Fri Dec 5 21:57:35 CET 2008

Guido van Rossum wrote:

At the risk of bringing up something that was already rejected, let me propose something that follows the path taken in 3.0 for filenames, rather than doubling back:

For os.environ, os.getenv() and os.putenv(), I think a similar approach as used for os.listdir() and os.getcwd() makes sense: let os.environ skip variables whose name or value is undecodable, and have a separate os.environb() which contains bytes; let os.getenv() and os.putenv() do the right thing when the arguments passed in are bytes. I prefer the method used by file.read() where an error is thrown when accessing undecodable data. I think in time python programmers will consider not throwing an exception a wart in python3. However, this is enough to allow programmers to do the right thing once an error is reported by users and the cause has been tracked down so it doesn't block fixing errors as the current code does.

And it's not like anyone expected python3 to be wart-free just because the python2 warts were fixed ;-)

For sys.argv, because it's positional, you can't skip undecodable values, so I propose to use error=replace for the decoding; again, we can add sys.argvb that contains the raw bytes values. The various os.exec*() and os.spawn*() calls (as well as os.system(), os.popen() and the subprocess module) should all accept bytes as well as strings. This also seems sane with the same comment about throwing errors.

-Toshio

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