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

Hagen Fürstenau hagenf at CoLi.Uni-SB.DE
Fri Sep 14 14:20:19 CEST 2007

That is not a concern. However, it is fundamentally the wrong thing to do. Most people rightfully view command line arguments and file names as strings, as they use the keyboard to enter them, and the computer uses letters from a font to display them. They are not bytes conceptually - they are strings in a potentially unknown encoding.

Are you sure that "strings in an unknown encoding" are conceptually strings and not rather bytes?

And what if we skillfully conserve unknown bytes in a private use or surrogate area and the application author actually knows the encoding and wants correctly decoded strings?

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