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

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Sun Dec 7 07:07:08 CET 2008

Guido van Rossum wrote:

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

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. I agree that the sky is not falling (as long as we get a binary API for env vars in 3.1) but I'm still wondering what the use case you see is. Most apps aren't file managers or ftp clients but when they interact with files (for instance, a file selection dialog) they need to be able to show the user all the relevant files. So on an app-by-app basis the need for this is high. On a code basis, I'd hope that most file selection dialogs are pulled out into libraries... but that still doesn't help me identify when someone would expect that asking python for a list of all files in a directory or a specific set of files in a directory should, without warning, return only a subset of them. In what situations is this appropriate behaviour?

-Toshio

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