[Python-Dev] Bytes path support (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Aug 19 20:44:14 CEST 2014

Ben Hoyt writes:

Fair enough. I don't quite understand, though -- why is the "official policy" to kill something that's "essential" on *nix?

They're not essential on *nix. Unix paths at the OS level are "just bytes" (even on Mac, although the most common Mac filesystem does enforce UTF-8 Unicode NFD). This use case is now perfectly well served by codecs.

However, there are a lot of applications that involve reading a file name from a directory, and passing it verbatim to another OS function. This case can be handled now using the surrogateescape error handler, but when these APIs were introduced we didn't even have a reliable way to roundtrip filenames because a Unix filename doesn't need to be a string of characters from any character set.

And there's the undeniable convenience of treating file names as opaque objects in those applications.

Regards,

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