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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Aug 20 01:44:05 CEST 2014

I'm sorry my moment of levity was taken so seriously.

With my serious hat on, I would like to claim that conceptually filenames are most definitely text. Due to various historical accidents the UNIX system calls often encoded text as arguments, and we sometimes need to control that encoding. Hence the occasional need for bytes arguments. But most of the time you don't have to think about that, and forcing users to worry about it is mostly as counter-productive as forcing to think about the encoding of every text file.

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