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

Adam Olsen rhamph at gmail.com
Sun Dec 7 05:53:07 CET 2008

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 6:51 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

André Malo wrote:

While on Windows: - underlying OS API uses Unicode - Unicode API just passes values straight through - binary API uses the system encoding to decode bytes names and values to be passed to the OS API and to encode Unicode names and values received from the OS API

Now that is somewhat strange. That way you'll have two unreliable APIs and need to switch depending on the platform again. Sory, system encoding was probably a poor choice of words there, since that generally means mbcs when talking about windows (which would indeed be a very poor choice of encoding). For binary wrappers around the Windows Unicode APIs, I was thinking specifically of using UTF-8, since that should be able to encode anything the Unicode APIs can handle.

If the Unicode APIs only have correct unicode, sure. If not you'll get errors translating to UTF-8 (and the byte APIs are supposed to pass bad names through unaltered.) Kinda ironic, no?

-- Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus

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