[issue10600] surrogateescape'd paths not readable on Windows XP.

[STINNER Victor]

STINNER Victor <victor.stinner at haypocalc.com> added the comment:

Use surrogateescape error handler to decode a Windows path is not a good idea. On Windows, the problem is not to decode a path (ANSI => wide char), but to encode a path (wide char => ANSI) to use a function expecting bytes path encoded to the ANSI code page. surrogateescape is only useful on the *decode* operation, to store undecodable bytes in special characters.

Why do you decode a Windows path using UTF-8? UTF-8 is not used, by default, as an ANSI code page. But first, what do you manipulate bytes path on Windows?

If you would like a portable program supporting UNIX/BSD (bytes) and Windows (unicode) paths with a single type, you should use str instead of bytes, because Unicode (with surrogateescape) is a superset of bytes.

Python 3.2 has os.fsencode() and os.fsdecode() functions to do that easily (to decode/encode UNIX/BSD paths).

----------
nosy: +haypo

_______________________________________
Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue10600>
_______________________________________