Newbie question about text encoding

[Dan Sommers]

On Sun, 08 Mar 2015 04:59:56 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 4:50 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:

>> Correct. Linux pathnames are octet strings regardless of the locale.
>>
>> That's why Linux developers should refer to filenames using bytes.
>> Unfortunately, Python itself violates that principle by having
>> os.listdir() return str objects (to mention one example).
> 
> Only because you gave it a str with the path name. If you want to
> refer to file names using bytes, then be consistent and refer to ALL
> file names using bytes. As I demonstrated, that works just fine.

Python 3.4.2 (default, Oct  8 2014, 10:45:20) 
[GCC 4.9.1] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import os
>>> type(os.listdir(os.curdir)[0])
<class 'str'>