[Python-Dev] PEP 383: Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces

[Ned Deily]

In article <m2ocueq6mm.fsf at cs.uu.nl>, Piet van Oostrum <piet at cs.uu.nl> 
wrote:
> >>>>> Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> (RO) wrote:
> >RO> For what it's worth, the OSX API's seem to behave as follows:
> >RO> * If you create a file with an non-UTF8 name on a HFS+ filesystem the
> >RO> system automaticly encodes the name.
> 
> >RO> That is,  open(chr(255), 'w') will silently create a file named '%FF'
> >RO> instead of the name you'd expect on a unix system.
> 
> Not for me (I am using Python 2.6.2).
> 
> >>> f = open(chr(255), 'w')
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> IOError: [Errno 22] invalid mode ('w') or filename: '\xff'
> >>> 

What version of OSX are you using?  On Tiger 10.4.11 I see the failure 
you see but on Leopard 10.5.6 the behavior Ronald reports.

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org