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

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Wed Aug 20 16:04:20 CEST 2014

On Wed Aug 20 2014 at 9:02:25 AM Antoine Pitrou <antoine at python.org> wrote:

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.

+1 from me as well. Allowing the low-level stuff work on bytes but keeping high-level actually high-level keeps with our consenting adults policy as well as making things possible, but not at the detriment of the common case. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20140820/7d1f305d/attachment.html>

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