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

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Aug 26 04:25:19 CEST 2014

R. David Murray writes:

Also, as has been discussed in this thread previously, any program that deals with filenames is dealing with human readable languages, even if posix itself treats the filenames as bytes.

That's a bit extreme. I can name two interesting applications offhand: git's object database and the Coda filesystem's containers.

It's true that for debugging purposes bytestrings representing largish numbers are readably encoded (in hexadecimal and decimal, respectively), but they're clearly not "human readable" in the sense you mean.

Nevertheless, these are the applications that prove your rule. You don't need the power of pathlib to conveniently (for the programmer) and efficiently handle the file structures these programs use. os.path is plenty.

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