Simon Cross writes:
a) There is some chance that at least ASCII characters will be displayed correctly if getfilesystemencoding() is similar to the encoding used and corrupted filenames will display correctly except for corrupted characters.
All you're saying is that the cases *you* can imagine running into work better. All I'm saying is the opposite. We're both right; the point is that that means that Python can't be, not all of the time. We know from experience (Emacs/Mule, Java) that trying to impose a theoretical system on encoding just doesn't work by itself[1], and in fact creates other problems by its very rigidity. I'd like to see Python not fall into that trap, too. Footnotes: [1] It needs system-level support as in Windows and Mac OS X.