[Python-Dev] PEP 383: Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Apr 29 15:39:26 CEST 2009

"Martin v. Löwis" writes:

I find the case pretty artificial, though: if the locale encoding changes, all file names will look incorrect to the user, so he'll quickly switch back, or rename all the files.

It's not necessarily the case that the locale encoding changes, but rather the name of the file. I have a couple of directories where I have Japanese in both EUC-JP and UTF-8, for example. (The applications where I never bothered to do a conversion from EUC to UTF-8 are things like stripping MIME attachments from messages and saving them to files when I changed my default.)

So I have a little Emacs Lisp function that tries EUC or UTF8 depending on date and falls back to the other on a decode error.

Another possible situation would be a user program in the user's locale communicating with a daemon running in some other locale (quite likely POSIX).

So while out of scope of the PEP, I don't think it's at all artificial.

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