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

Steven D'Aprano steve at pearwood.info
Sat Dec 6 02:03:55 CET 2008

On Sat, 6 Dec 2008 09🔞47 am Nick Coghlan wrote:

Toshio Kuratomi wrote: > Guido van Rossum wrote: >> Glob was just an example. Many use cases for directory traversal >> couldn't care less if they see all files. > > Okay. Makes it harder to prove correct or not if I don't know what > the use case is :-) I can't think of a single use case off-hand. > > Even your example of a ??.txt file making retrieval of *.py files > fail is a little broken. If there was a ??.py file that was > undecodable the program would most likely want to know that file > existed.

Why? Most programs won't be able to do anything with it.

But the program can report a sensible error message, so the user can fix the problem.

I'd rather have the Python API report errors then silence them, at least by default. I don't suppose it's on the table for functions to grow an extra argument that tells them to skip broken file names and environment variables?

What I have in mind is something like:

os.listdir(path, silence_errors=False) -> list_of_strings

By default, if a filename in path is not a valid string, an exception is raised, with the guilty file name given in bytes as an attribute of the exception. If silence_errors is true, the invalid file names are silently skipped.

-- Steven

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