[Python-Dev] [Python-3000] New proposition for Python3 bytes filename issue

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 4:08 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Oct 2008 07:40:01 am Martin v. Löwis wrote:
>> >> On Windows, we might reject bytes filenames for all file
>> >> operations: open(), unlink(), os.path.join(), etc. (raise a
>> >> TypeError or UnicodeError)
>> >
>> > Since I've seen no objections to this yet: please no. If we offer a
>> > "lower-level" bytes filename API, it should work for all platforms.
>>
>> Unfortunately, it can't. You cannot represent all possible file names
>> in a byte string in Windows (just as you can't do so in a Unicode
>> string on Unix).
>
> Sorry, maybe I'm just being thick here, but I don't understand how that
> is possible. On the physical disk, each Windows file name must be
> represented by a byte string, yes? So how is it possible that there are
> Windows files with names that can't be represented as a byte string?
> What have I missed?

I believe on disk it uses UTF-16.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)