[Python-Dev] [Python-3000] New proposition for Python3 bytes filename issue (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Sep 30 18:46:00 CEST 2008

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 8:20 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

In the end, I think it's better not to be clever and just return the filenames that cannot be decoded as bytes objects in os.listdir().

Unfortunately that's going to break most code that is using os.listdir(), so it's hardly an improved experience.

Passing those to open() will then open the files as expected, in most other cases the application will have to provide explicit conversions in whatever way best fits the application.

In most cases the app will try to concatenate a pathname given as a string and then it will fail.

Also note that os.listdir() isn't the only source of filesnames. You often read them from a file, a database, some socket, etc, so letting the application decide what to do is not asking too much, IMHO.

In all those cases, the code that reads them is responsible for picking an encoding or relying on a default encoding, and the resulting filenames are always expressed as text, not bytes. I don't think it's the same at all.

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

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