[Python-Dev] Use our strict mbcs codec instead of the Windows ANSI API (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at haypocalc.com
Tue Oct 25 10:52:43 CEST 2011

Le Mardi 25 Octobre 2011 09:09:56 vous avez écrit :

If it's the byte APIs (i.e. using bytes as file names), then I'm -1 on this proposal. People that explicitly use bytes for file names deserve to get whatever exact platform semantics the platform has to offer. This is true on Unix, and it is also true on Windows.

For your information, it took me something like 3 months (when I was working on the issue #12281) to understand exactly how Windows handles undecodable bytes and unencodable characters. I did a lot of tests on different Windows versions (XP, Vista and Seven, the behaviour changed in Windows Vista). I had to take notes because it is really complex. Well, I wanted to understand exactly all code pages, including CP_UTF7 and CP_UTF8, not only the most common ones like cp1252 or cp932.

See the dedicated section in my book to learn more about these funtions:

http://www.haypocalc.com/tmp/unicode-2011-07-20/html/operating_systems.html#encode- and-decode-functions

Some information are available in MultiByteToWideChar and WideCharToMultiByte documentation, but they are not well explained :-p

Victor

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