[Python-Dev] When should pathlib stop being provisional? (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Apr 6 01:37:27 EDT 2016

Chris Angelico writes:

Outside of deliberate tests, we don't create files on our disks whose names are strings of random bytes;

Wishful thinking. First, names made of control characters have often been deliberately used by miscreants to conceal their warez. Second, in some systems it's all too easy to create paths with components in different locales (the place I've seen it most frequently is in NFS mounts). I think that's much less true today, but perhaps that's only because my employer figured out that it was much less pain if system paths were pure ASCII so that it mostly didn't matter what encoding users chose for their subtrees.

It remains important to be able to handle nearly arbitrary bytestrings in file names as far as I can see. Please note that 100 million Japanese and 1 billion Chinese by and large still prefer their homegrown encodings (plural!!) to Unicode, while many systems are now defaulting filenames to UTF-8. There's plenty of room remaining for copying bytestrings to arguments of open and friends.

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