Why exception from os.path.exists()?

[Charles Hixson]

On 06/07/2018 12:45 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 7, 2018 at 1:55 PM, Steven D'Aprano
> <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> On Tue, 05 Jun 2018 23:27:16 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>>> And an ASCIIZ string cannot contain a byte value of zero. The parallel
>>> is exact.
>> Why should we, as Python programmers, care one whit about ASCIIZ strings?
>> They're not relevant. You might as well say that file names cannot
>> contain the character "π" because ASCIIZ strings don't support it.
>>
>> No they don't, and yet nevertheless file names can and do contain
>> characters outside of the ASCIIZ range.
> Under Linux, a file name contains bytes, most commonly representing
> UTF-8 sequences. So... an ASCIIZ string *can* contain that character,
> or at least a representation of it. Yet it cannot contain "\0".
>
> ChrisA
This seems like an argument for allowing byte strings to be used as file 
names, not for altering text strings.  If file names are allowed to 
contain values that are illegal for text strings, then they shouldn't be 
necessarily considered as text strings.

The unicode group sets one set of rules, and their rules should apply in 
their area.  The Linux group sets another set of rules, and their rules 
should apply in their area.  Just because there is a large area of 
overlap doesn't mean that the two areas are congruent.  Byte strings are 
designed to handle any byte pattern, but text strings are designed to 
handle a subset of those patterns. Most byte strings are readable as 
text, but not all of them.