[Python-Dev] pathlib - current status of discussions

[Nick Coghlan]

On 13 April 2016 at 02:19, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> So: why use strings as the lingua franca of paths? i.e. the basis of the
> path protocol. maybe we should support only two path representations:
>
> 1) A "proper" path object -- i.e. pathlib.Path or anything else that
> supports the path protocol.
>
> 2) the bytes that the OS actually needs.
>
> this would mean that the protocol would be to have a __pathbytes__() method
> that woulde return the bytes that should be passed off to the OS.

The reason to favour strings over raw bytes for path manipulation is
the same reason to favour them anywhere else: to avoid having to worry
about encodings *while* you're manipulating things, and instead only
worry about the encoding when actually talking to the OS (which may be
UTF-16-LE to talk to a Windows API, or UTF-8 to talk to a *nix API, or
something else entirely if your OS is set up that way, or you're
writing the path to a file or network packet, rather than using it
locally).

Regardless of what we decide about os.fspath's return type, that
general principle won't change - if you're manipulating bytes paths
directly, you're doing something relatively specialised (like working
on CPython's own os module).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia