[Python-3000] [Python-Dev] Filename as byte string in python 2.6 or 3.0?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Glenn Linderman writes:

 > OK, but file names are not (always) Unicode strings.  So it is possible 
 > to have a conforming process that still manipulates non-Unicode 
 > filenames, as long as it doesn't emit them in places where Unicode 
 > strings are required.

Sure.  My point is that "emission elimination" is very hard to arrange
under any of the not-quite Unicode schemes that have been discussed,
and almost surely the effort to achieve even "emission reduction" will
almost never occur if we default to imperfect but pretty good
sanitization.

It will encourage the same kind of coding that we're familiar with
already: things almost always work for most programmers if they assume
that it's OK to ignore the problem.

 > So when a foreign file system is mounted, the driver for that file
 > system gets "first crack" and defining legal names and how to
 > handle files that don't have legal names.  For example, on Windows,
 > I wouldn't be surprised to see NFS drivers that suppress
 > non-Unicode names at the 16-bit API level.  At that point, Python
 > would not be responsible for

... much of anything.  Nice work if we can get it; I won't be holding
my breath.  For starters, USB memory sticks are still all FAT format
by default.

 > There are lots of kinds of strings.

Not in Python, though.  There are Unicode strings and there are bytes
objects.  If the latter were acceptable for this application, we'd
have no problem.