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[Python-Dev] Bytes path support

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Fri Aug 22 01:38:55 CEST 2014 
On 22 Aug 2014 09:24, "Isaac Morland" <ijmorlan at uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> I think the real tension here is between the POSIX level where filenames
are byte strings (except for \x00, which is reserved for string
termination) where \x2F has special interpretation, and absolutely every
application ever written, in every language, which wants filenames to be
character strings.

That's one of the best summaries of the situation I've ever seen :)

Most languages (including Python 2) throw up their hands and say this is
the developer's problem to deal with. Python 3 says it's *our* problem to
deal with on behalf of our developers. The "surrogateescape" error handler
allows recalcitrant bytes to be dealt with relatively gracefully in most
situations. We don't quite cover *everything* yet (hence the complaints
from some of the folks that are experts at dealing with Python 2 Unicode
handling on POSIX systems), but the remaining problems are a lot more
tractable than the "teach every native English speaker everywhere how to
handle Unicode properly" problem.

Regards,
Nick.
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