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

glyph at divmod.com glyph at divmod.com
Tue Sep 30 20:42:58 CEST 2008

On 06:16 pm, guido at python.org wrote:

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 LCCTYPE=enUS. (as long as is a recognized encoding). There are probably 5 other environment variables to influence this. :-(

Only 5? Great! :-)

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.

There are other ways to glean this knowledge; for example, looking at the 'iocharset' or 'nls' mount options supplied to mount various filesystems. I thought maybe Python (or some C library call) might be invoking some logic that did something with data like that; if not, great, one day when I have some free time (meaning: never) I can implement that logic myself without duplicating a bunch of work.

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