Why exception from os.path.exists()?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 02 Jun 2018 01:51:07 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:

> What about the case where somebody calls
> 
> os.path.exists("/tmp/foo\x00bar")
> 
> If /tmp/foo exists should it return True?

That depends on whether /tmp/foo is a directory containing a file \0bar 
or not. Since that is not a legal file name on POSIX systems, it should 
return False. On Windows, I don't know whether such a file could exist or 
not.

> That's what would happen if
> you passed that string directly to the libc call.

Fortunately, as Python programmers, we're not passing the string directly 
to the libc call. We're passing a Python string to a Python function.

Nor are we receiving the result directly back from the libc call, since 
it neither returns bool objects, nor raises exceptions on error.




-- 
Steven D'Aprano
"Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've been seeing
it everywhere." -- Jon Ronson