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

Nicholas Bastin nick.bastin at gmail.com
Fri Sep 28 08:21:18 CEST 2007

On 9/28/07, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Nicholas Bastin schrieb: > On 9/22/07, martin at v.loewis.de <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote: >> argc/argv does not exist on Windows (that you seem to see it >> anyway is an illusion), and if it did exist, it would be characters, >> not bytes. > > Of course it exists on Windows. argc/argv are defined by the C > standard, and say what you will about Windows, but it has a conforming > implementation.

It doesn't. Microsoft has a conforming implementation of C for Windows (Visual C), but Windows does not.

msvcrt ships with the operating system - I'd call that a conforming implementation. Programs running in the standard C runtime are just as much applications as programs using the Win32 API in advapi32. But we have drifted far from the topic at hand, since this is obviously a misunderstanding on whether Windows was used to refer to the OS or the API.

I still regard handling argv as anything other the raw bytes that come from the host as bad. argv means something - regardless of whether WinMain provides it or not. If we're going to call something sys.argv, then presumably that was done because there was a conventionally accepted meaning to it, and I would argue that meaning comes from standard C. If it were called sys.lpCmdLine, then I'd say you have a point, but it isn't, and to the degree that it isn't, I believe that we should emulate the standard argv behaviour (especially since lpCmdLine doesn't include the program name).

Of course, on Win32 this entire issue is moot, given the availability of CommandLineToArgvW(), which would allow you to provide a nice convenient unicode argv. However, since not all supported platforms provide us this functionality, I would suggest we store the result of any effort to transform argv into unicode into some other well named member of sys (or make it a function call so it can be computed on demand if you don't want it in the first place). Changing the current meaning of argv will break applications which already handle this problem, and while I realize that that's not a showstopper for Python 3k, I don't see any particular benefit to introducing this inconsistency, rather than adding something more defined, like sys.arguments.

-- Nick

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