[Python-Dev] pathlib - current status of discussions

[Random832]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016, at 12:05, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Random832 writes:
> 
>  > And what such incompatibilities exist between bytes and str for the
>  > purpose of representing file paths?
> 
> A plethora of encodings.

Only one encoding, fsencode/fsdecode. All other encodings are not for
filenames.

>  > At the end of the day, there's exactly one answer to "what file on
>  > disk this represents (or would represent if it existed)".
> 
> Nope.  Suppose those bytes were read from a file or a socket?  It's
> dangerous to assume that encoding matches the file system's.

Why can I pass them to os.open, then, or to os.path.join so long as
everything else is also bytes?

On UNIX, the filesystem is in bytes, so saying that bytes can't match
the filesystem is absurd. Converting it to str with fsdecode will
*always, absolutely, 100% of the time* give a str that will address the
same file that the bytes does (even if it's "dangerous" to assume that
was the name the user wanted, that's beyond the scope of what the module
is capable of dealing with).