[Python-Dev] Filename as byte string in python 2.6 or 3.0?

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Of the suggestions I've seen so far, I like Marcin's Mono-inspired
> NULL-escape codec idea the best. Since these strings all come from parts
> of the environment where NULLs are not permitted, a simple "'\0' in
> text" check will immediately identify any strings where decoding failed
> (for applications which care about the difference and want to try to do
> better), while applications which don't care will receive perfectly
> valid Python strings that can be passed around and manipulated as if the
> decoding error never happened.

I'm not so sure. While it maintains *internal* consistency, printing
and displaying those filenames isn't likely going to give useful
results. E.g. on the terminal emulator I happen to be using right now
null bytes are simply ignored. Another danger might be that the null
character may be seen as the end of a string by some other library.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)