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

Zooko O'Whielacronx zooko at zooko.com
Tue Apr 28 20:51:43 CEST 2009

On Apr 28, 2009, at 6:46 AM, Hrvoje Niksic wrote:

Are you proposing to unconditionally encode file names as iso8859-15, or to do so only when undecodeable bytes are encountered?

For what it is worth, what we have previously planned to do for the
Tahoe project is the second of these -- decode using some 1-byte
encoding such as iso-8859-1, iso-8859-15, or windows-1252 only in the
case that attempting to decode the bytes using the local alleged
encoding failed.

If you switch to iso8859-15 only in the presence of undecodable UTF-8, then you have the same round-trip problem as the PEP: both b'\xff' and b'\xc3\xbf' will be converted to u'\u00ff' without a way to unambiguously recover the original file name.

Why do you say that? It seems to work as I expected here:

'\xff'.decode('iso-8859-15') u'\xff' '\xc3\xbf'.decode('iso-8859-15') u'\xc3\xbf'

'\xff'.decode('cp1252') u'\xff' '\xc3\xbf'.decode('cp1252') u'\xc3\xbf'

Regards,

Zooko

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list