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

Ethan Furman ethan at stoneleaf.us
Thu Apr 14 11:02:22 EDT 2016

On 04/14/2016 06:56 AM, Victor Stinner wrote:

2016-04-14 15:40 GMT+02:00 Nick Coghlan:

Even earlier, Victor Stinner wrote:

I consider that the final goal of the whole discussion is to support something like:

path = os.path.join(pathlibpath, "strpath", direntry) That's not a new problem though, it already exists if you pass in a mix of bytes and str: (...) There's also already a solution (regardless of whether you want bytes or str as the result), which is to explicitly coerce all the arguments to the same type: --> os.path.join(*map(os.fsdecode, ("str", b"bytes"))) (...) I don't understand. What is the point of adding a new fspath protocol to implicitly convert path objects to strings, if you still have to use an explicit conversion?

That's the crux of the issue -- some of us think the job of fspath is to simply retrieve the inherent data from the pathy object, not to do any implicit conversions.

I would really expect that a high-level API like pathlib would solve encodings issues for me. IMHO DirEntry entries created by os.scandir(bytes) must use os.fsdecode() in their fspath method.

Then let pathlib do it. As a high-level interface I have no issue with pathlib converting DirEntry bytes objects to str using fsdecode (or whatever makes sense); os.path.join (and by extension os.fspath and fspath) should do no such thing.

os.path.join(*map(os.fsdecode, ("str", b"bytes"))) This code is quite complex for a newbie, don't you think so?

A newbie should be using pathlib. If pathlib is not low-level enough, then the newbie needs to learn about low-level stuff.

-- Ethan

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