[issue8603] Create a bytes version of os.environ and getenvb()

[Marc-Andre Lemburg]

Marc-Andre Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> added the comment:

Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> 
> Martin v. Löwis <martin at v.loewis.de> added the comment:
> 
>> Your name will end up being partially escaped as surrogate:
>>
>> 'L\udcf6wis'
>>
>> Further processing will fail
> 
> That depends on the further processing, no?
> 
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
>> UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\udcf6' in position 1: ordinal not in
>> range(256)
> 
> Where did you get this error from?

The roundup email interface must have eaten this
first line of the traceback: >>> _.encode('latin-1')

>> It doesn't work if an application tries to work *with* the data,
>> e.g. tries to convert it
> 
> Converting it to what?
> 
>> parse it
> 
> Parsing will work fine.
> 
>> decode it
> 
> It's a string. You shouldn't decode it.
>
>> The reason is
>> that information included by the use of the 'surrogateescape'
>> error handler is lost along the way and this then causes data
>> corruption.
> 
> And how would that not happen if it was bytes? The problems you describe
> were one of the primary motivations to switch to Unicode: it's *byte*
> strings that have these problems.

Martin, it's obvious that you are not even trying to understand
what I'm saying. That's not a good basis for discussion.

----------

_______________________________________
Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue8603>
_______________________________________