[Python-Dev] Filename as byte string in python 2.6 or 3.0? (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Sep 30 03:13:11 CEST 2008

Greg Ewing writes:

Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:

AFAIK, OS X guarantees UTF-8 for filesystem encodings. So the OS also provides Unicode filenames and how it deals with broken or legacy media is left up to the OS.

Does this mean that the OS always returns valid utf-8 strings from filesystem calls, even if the media is broken or legacy?

No, this means Ulrich is wrong. NFD-normalized UTF-8 is more or less enforced by the default filesystem, but Mac OS X up to 10.4 at least also supports the FreeBSD filesystems, and some of those can have any encoding you like or none at all (ie, KOI8-R and Shift JIS in the same directory is possible).

If you have a Mac it's easy enough to test by creating a disk image with a non-default file system.

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