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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Sat Dec 6 20:13:38 CET 2008

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 10:53 AM, <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:

On 02:34 pm, phd at phd.pp.ru wrote:

I agree 100%. Russian Unix users use at least 5 different encodings (koi8-r, cp1251 and utf-8 are the most frequent in use, cp866 and iso-8859-5 are less frequent). I have an FTP server with some filenames in koi8 encoding - these filenames are for unix clients, - and some filenames in cp1251 for w32 clients. Sometimes I run utf-8 xterm (I am a commandline/console unixhead) for my needs (read email, write files in utf-8 with characters beyond koi8-r, which is my primary encoding) - and I still can work with filenames in koi8/cp1251 encodings. My filemanager (Midnight Commander, for the matter) shows these files and directories as "?????.???", but I can chdir to such directories, and I can open such files. It would be a big bad blow for me if filemanagers (or other programs) start to filter these filenames. I find it interesting to note that the only users in this discussion who actually have these problems in real life all have this attitude. It is expected that in an imperfect world we will have imperfect encodings, but it is super important that software which can open files can deal with not understanding the character translation of the filename.

For file managers and similar tools I am absolutely 100% in agreement -- that's why the binary APIs are there.

Most apps aren't file managers or ftp clients though. The sky is not falling.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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