[Python-Dev] file system path protocol PEP (original) (raw)

Koos Zevenhoven k7hoven at gmail.com
Thu May 12 14:32:35 EDT 2016

On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 8:22 PM, Sjoerd Job Postmus <sjoerdjob at sjoerdjob.com> wrote:

I would like to make just 1 comment regarding the question of accepting (or not) bytes as output of os.fspath.

The whole point of adding os.fspath is to make it easier to use Path objects. This is in an effort to gain greater adoption of pathlib in libraries. Now, this is an excellent idea. However, if it were to reject bytes, that would mean that when libraries start to use pathlib, it would suddenly become harder for people that actually need bytes-support to use pathlib. Now, the claim 'if you need bytes, you should not be using pathlib` is a reasonable one. But what if I need bytes and a specific library (say, image handling, or a web framework, or ...). It's not up to me if that library uses pathlib or plain old os.path.join. Is using surrogate-escapes enough for this case? I myself am not sure, (and also not affected), but it sounds to me that rejecting bytes is a wrong approach if there is no proper workaround (assuming the use-case of pathlib is somewhere deep in library code).

This is out of the scope of this PEP and probably a very insignificant issue (luckily, this is not the pathlib PEP). Surrogates will probably work and if not, on can "blaim" broken filenames ;).

-- Koos

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