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

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Sep 30 23:40:01 CEST 2008

On Windows, we might reject bytes filenames for all file operations: open(), unlink(), os.path.join(), etc. (raise a TypeError or UnicodeError) Since I've seen no objections to this yet: please no. If we offer a "lower-level" bytes filename API, it should work for all platforms.

Unfortunately, it can't. You cannot represent all possible file names in a byte string in Windows (just as you can't do so in a Unicode string on Unix).

So using byte strings on Windows would work for some files, but fail for others. In particular, listdir might give you a list of file names which you then can't open/stat/recurse into.

(of course, you could use UTF-8 as the file system encoding on Windows, but then you will have to rewrite a lot of C code first)

Regards, Martin

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