[Python-Dev] Pathlib enhancements - acceptable inputs and outputs for fspath and os.fspath() (original) (raw)

Ethan Furman ethan at stoneleaf.us
Mon Apr 11 17:10:26 EDT 2016

On 04/11/2016 01:42 PM, Victor Stinner wrote:

2016-04-11 21:00 GMT+02:00 Brett Cannon:

I'm -0 on allowing fspath to return bytes, but we can see what others think. With the PEP 383, a bytes filename can be stored as str using the surrogateescape error handler. So DirEntry can convert a bytes path to str using os.fsdecode().

I am far from a unicode expert, but if I understand this correctly you are proposing that DirEntry.whatever can always return a str using the surogateescape (SE) method.

However, before this SE string can be used, it would need to be converted back to bytes, and with the same SE method, yes? And this has already been implemented in the stdlib?

So my concern in such a case is what happens if we pass this SE string somewhere else: a UTF-8 file, or over a socket, or into a database? Does this have issues that we wouldn't face if we just used bytes?

-- Ethan

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