[Python-3000] Unicode and OS strings (original) (raw)

Hagen Fürstenau hagenf at CoLi.Uni-SB.DE
Fri Sep 14 11:15:00 CEST 2007

Is it too unreasonable to keep the byte strings we get from the OS as byte strings in Python (since we're not sure about their encoding) and offer functions for getting strings?

sys.argv could be of type bytes and sys.arguments (or whatever) could be a function taking an encoding parameter (which defaults to UTF-8) and returning strings.

Of course that's backwards incompatible and I'm not sure if it's too late for something like this now.

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