[Python-Dev] File system path encoding on Windows

[eryk sun]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 3:58 PM, Steve Dower <steve.dower at python.org> wrote:
> All MSVC users have been pushed towards Unicode for many years. The .NET
> Framework has defaulted to UTF-8 its entire existence. The use of code pages
> has been discouraged for decades. We're not going first :)

I just wrote a simple function to enumerate the 822 system locales on
my Windows box (using EnumSystemLocalesEx and GetLocaleInfoEx, which
are Unicode-only functions), and 36.7% of them lack an ANSI codepage.
They're Unicode-only locales. UTF-8 is the only way to support these
locales with a bytes API.