[Python-Dev] unicode imports (original) (raw)

Ronald Oussoren ronaldoussoren at mac.com
Sat Jun 17 18:04:54 CEST 2006

On 17-jun-2006, at 6:44, Nick Coghlan wrote:

Bob Ippolito wrote:

There's a similar issue in that if sys.prefix contains a colon, Python is also busted: http://python.org/sf/1507224

Of course, that's not a Windows issue, but it is everywhere else. The offending code in that case is Modules/getpath.c, Since it has to do with the definition of PyGetPath as returning a single string that is really a DELIM separated list of strings, where DELIM is defined by the current platform (';' on Windows, ':' everywhere else), this seems more like a platform problem than a Python problem, though - you can't have directories containing a colon as an entry in PATH or PYTHONPATH either. It's not really Python's fault that the platform defines a legal filename character as the delimiter for path entries.

On unix-y systems any character except the NUL byte can be used in a
legal fileystem path, that leaves awfully little characters to use as
delimiter without risking issues like the one in the bug Bob mentioned.

The only real alternative I can see is to normalise PyGetPath to always return a ';' delimited list of strings, regardless of platform, and update PySysSetPath accordingly. That'd cause potential compatibility problems for embedded interpreters, though.

That wouldn't help, ';' is also a valid character in filenames on
Unix. Except for accepting the status quo (which is a perfectly fine
alternative) there seem to be two valid ways to solve this problem.
You can either define Py_GetPath2 that returns a python list or
tuple, or introduce some way of quoting the delimiter. Both would be
backward incompatible.

Ronald

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list