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[Python-Dev] pathlib - current status of discussions

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Tue Apr 12 01:40:16 EDT 2016 
Chris Barker - NOAA Federal wrote:
> Why in the world do the  os.path functions need to work with Path
> objects?

So that applications using path objects can pass them
to library code that uses os.path to manipulate them.

> I'm confused about what a bytes path IS -- is it encoded?

It's a sequence of bytes identifying a file. Often it
will be an encoding of som piece of text in the file
system encoding, but there's no guarantee of that.

> Can you assume it can be decoded ?

Only if you use an encoding in which all byte sequences
are valid, such as latin1 or utf8+surrogateescape.

> So the ONLY thing
> you should do with it is pass it along to another low level system
> call.

Not quite -- you can separate it into components and
work with them. Essentially the same set of operations
that os.path provides.

>>- the names would be fspath and __fspath__, since the result may be
>>either a path name as text, or an encoded path name as bytes
> 
> I like __pathname__ better because this entire effort is because we'
> be decided itMs important to make the distinction between a "path" and
> the text representation of said path.

I agree -- the term "pathname" can cover both text and
bytes. When posix talks about pathnames it's really
talking about bytes.

-- 
Greg
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