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

Antoine Pitrou antoine at python.org
Wed Aug 20 15:01:40 CEST 2014

Le 20/08/2014 07:08, Nick Coghlan a écrit :

It's not just the JVM that says text and binary APIs should be separate - it's every widely used operating system services layer except POSIX. The POSIX way works well if everyone reliably encodes things as UTF-8 or always uses encoding detection, but its failure mode is unfortunately silent data corruption. That said, there's a lot of Python software that is POSIX specific, where bytes paths would be the least of the barriers to porting to Windows or Jython. I'm personally +1 on consistently allowing binary paths in lower level APIs, but disallowing them in higher level explicitly cross platform abstractions like pathlib.

I fully agree with Nick's position here.

To elaborate specifically about pathlib, it doesn't handle bytes paths but allows you to generate them if desired: https://docs.python.org/3/library/pathlib.html#operators

Adding full bytes support to pathlib would have added a lot of complication and fragility in the implementation and in the API (is it allowed to combine str and bytes paths? should they have separate classes?), for arguably little benefit.

I think if you want low-level features (such as unconverted bytes paths under POSIX), it is reasonable to point you to low-level APIs.

Regards

Antoine.

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