I'm sorry for the lack of clarity of my posts, but somehow you're completely missing the point. The point is precisely that Python *won't* use Shift JIS as the file system encoding (if it did there would be no problem with reading Shift JIS), but the people who created the media *did*.
Now, with Python's file system encoding == UTF-8 or any packed EUC, and more than a handful of Shift JIS or Big5 characters in file names, one is *almost certain* to encounter ASCII as the second byte of a multibyte sequence. PEP 383 can't handle this
Not true. PEP 383 handles this very example just fine, with no problems that I can see. Can you propose a specific example that you think might cause problems? By "specific", I mean: what file names (exact bytes, please), what locale charset, what API calls. Regards, Martin