[Python-Dev] Python-3.0, unicode, and os.environ

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Adam Olsen wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 6:55 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
>> Unfortunately, even programmers experienced in I18N like Martin, and
>> those with intuition-that-has-the-force-of-law<wink> like Guido,
>> express deliberate disbelief on this point.  They say that filesystem
>> names and environment variable values are text, which is true from the
>> semantic viewpoint but can't be fully supported by any implementation.
> 
> With all the focus on backup tools and file managers I think we've
> lost perspective.  They're an important use case, but hardly the
> dominant one.
> 
> Please, as a user, if your app is creating new files, do NOT use
> bytes!  You have no excuse for creating garbage, and garbage doesn't
> help the user any.  Getting the encoding right, use the unicode APIs,
> and don't pass the buck on to everything else.
> 
Uhmmm.... That's good advice but doesn't solve any problems :-(.  No
matter what I create, the filenames will be bytes when the next person
reads them in.  If my locale is shift-js and the person I'm sharing the
file with uses utf-8 things won't work.  Even if my locale is utf-8
(since I come from a European nation) and their locale is utf-16
(because they're from an Asian nation) the Unicode API won't work.

-Toshio

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