[Python-Dev] File system path encoding on Windows (original) (raw)

eryk sun eryksun at gmail.com
Mon Aug 22 13:31:44 EDT 2016

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 3:58 PM, Steve Dower <steve.dower at python.org> wrote:

All MSVC users have been pushed towards Unicode for many years. The .NET Framework has defaulted to UTF-8 its entire existence. The use of code pages has been discouraged for decades. We're not going first :)

I just wrote a simple function to enumerate the 822 system locales on my Windows box (using EnumSystemLocalesEx and GetLocaleInfoEx, which are Unicode-only functions), and 36.7% of them lack an ANSI codepage. They're Unicode-only locales. UTF-8 is the only way to support these locales with a bytes API.

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