[Python-Dev] a suggestion ... Re: PEP 383 (again) (original) (raw)

Michael Urman murman at gmail.com
Thu Apr 30 17:43:02 CEST 2009

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 09:42, Thomas Breuel <tmbdev at gmail.com> wrote:

So, I don't see any reason to prefer your half surrogate quoting to the Mono U+0000-based quoting.  Both seem to achieve the same goal with respect to round tripping file names, displaying them, etc., but Mono quoting actually results in valid unicode strings.  It works because null is the one character that's not legal in a UNIX path name.

This seems to summarize only half of the problem. Mono's U+0000 quoting creates a string which is an invalid filename; PEP 383's creates one which is an unsanctioned collection of code units. Neither can be passed directly to the posix filesystem in question. I favor PEP 383 because its Unicode strings can be usefully passed to most APIs that would display it usefully. Mono's U+0000 probably truncates most strings. And since such non-valid Unicode strings can occur on the Windows filesystem, I don't find their use in PEP 383 to be a flaw.

-- Michael Urman

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