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

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Fri May 13 06:54:05 EDT 2016

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 8:19 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

I feel this is Not Our Problem. Surely the stdlib cannot be held responsible for all the poor decisions made by third-party libraries? If a library hard-codes "\" as their directory separator, because everyone uses Windows, you'd simply say "this library is not very good for my use-case". Likewise if it rejects bytes paths, then:

- perhaps that library is not fit for your purpose; - perhaps you can use it, but with the limitation that you can no longer support all paths, but only the ones which can be accessed via a string path; - perhaps you can build a compatibility layer that lets you use both bytes and the library.

AFAICT, the compatibility layer would simply decode the bytes using surrogateescape handling, which should round-trip anything.

Or am I wrong here somewhere?

ChrisA

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