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

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at gmail.com
Thu Apr 14 12:04:36 EDT 2016

2016-04-14 17:29 GMT+02:00 Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us>:

Interoperability with other systems and/or libraries. If we use surrogateescape to transform str to bytes, and the other side does not, we no longer have a workable path.

I guess that you mean a Python library? When you exchange with external programs or call a C libraries, Python is responsible to encode Unicode to bytes with os.fsencode(). The external part is not aware that Python uses surrogateescape, it gets "regular" bytes.

I suggest to consider such Python library as external programs and libraries: convert Unicode to bytes with os.fsencode(), but also process paths as Unicode "inside" your application.

It's the basic rule to handle correctly Unicode in an application: decode inputs as soon as possible, and encode back as late as possible. Encode/decode at borders.

Victor

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