[Python-Dev] Adding the 'path' module (was Re: Some RFE for review)

[Thomas Heller]

Neil Hodgson <nyamatongwe at gmail.com> writes:

> Thomas Heller:
>
>> OTOH, Python is lacking a lot when you have to handle unicode strings on
>> sys.path, in command line arguments, environment variables and maybe
>> other places.  
>
>    A new patch #1231336 "Add unicode for sys.argv, os.environ,
> os.system" is now in SourceForge. New parallel features sys.argvu and
> os.environu are provided and os.system accepts unicode arguments
> similar to PEP 277. A screenshot showing why the existing features are
> inadequate and the new features an enhancement are at
> http://www.scintilla.org/pyunicode.png
>    One problem is that when using "python -c cmd args", sys.argvu
> includes the "cmd" but sys.argv does not. They both contain the "-c".

Not only that, all the other flags like -O and -E are also in sys.argvu
but not in sys.argv.

>    os.system was changed to make it easier to add some test cases but
> then that looked like too much trouble. There are far too many
> variants on exec*, spawn* and popen* to write a quick patch for these.

Those are nearly obsoleted by the subprocess module (although I do not
know how that handles unicode.

Thomas