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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Sep 30 20:16:31 CEST 2008

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 11:12 AM, <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:

The one thing it doesn't do is expose the decoding rules for the higher- level applications to deal with. I am pretty sure I don't understand how the interaction between filesystem encoding and user locale works in that case, though, so I can't immediately recommend a way to do it.

You can ask what the filesystem encoding is with sys.getfilesystemencoding(). On my Linux box I can make this return anything I like by setting LC_CTYPE=en_US. (as long as is a recognized encoding). There are probably 5 other environment variables to influence this. :-(

Of course that doesn't help for undecodable filenames, and in that case I don't think anything can help you unless you have a lot of additional knowledge about what the user might be doing, e.g. you know a few other encodings to try that make sense for their environment.

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

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