[Python-Dev] pathlib - current status of discussions (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Apr 12 01:40:16 EDT 2016

Chris Barker - NOAA Federal wrote:

Why in the world do the os.path functions need to work with Path objects?

So that applications using path objects can pass them to library code that uses os.path to manipulate them.

I'm confused about what a bytes path IS -- is it encoded?

It's a sequence of bytes identifying a file. Often it will be an encoding of som piece of text in the file system encoding, but there's no guarantee of that.

Can you assume it can be decoded ?

Only if you use an encoding in which all byte sequences are valid, such as latin1 or utf8+surrogateescape.

So the ONLY thing you should do with it is pass it along to another low level system call.

Not quite -- you can separate it into components and work with them. Essentially the same set of operations that os.path provides.

- the names would be fspath and fspath, since the result may be either a path name as text, or an encoded path name as bytes I like pathname better because this entire effort is because we' be decided itMs important to make the distinction between a "path" and the text representation of said path.

I agree -- the term "pathname" can cover both text and bytes. When posix talks about pathnames it's really talking about bytes.

-- Greg

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