[Python-Dev] Bytes path support

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Chris Barker - NOAA Federal writes:

 > This brings up the other key problem. If file names are (almost)
 > arbitrary bytes, how do you write one to/read one from a text file
 > with a particular encoding? ( or for that matter display it on a
 > terminal)

"Very carefully."

But this is strictly from need.  *Nobody* (with the exception of the
crackers who like to name their programs things like "\u0007") *wants*
to do this.  Real people want to name their files in some human
language they understand, and spell it in the usual way, and encode
those characters as bytes in the usual way.

Decoding those characters in the usual way and getting nonsense is the
exceptional case, and it must be the application's or user's problem
to decide what to do.  They know where they got the file from and
usually have some idea of what its name should look like.  Python
doesn't, so Python cannot solve it for them.

For that reason, I believe that Python's "normal"/high-level approach
to file handling should treat file names as (human-oriented) text.  Of
course Python should be able to handle bytes straight from the disk,
but most programmers shouldn't have to.

 > And people still want to say posix isn't broken in this regard?

Deal with it, bro'.<wink/>