On Wed, 1 Oct 2008 07:40:01 am Martin v. Löwis wrote:
On Windows, we might reject bytes filenames for all file operations: open(), unlink(), os.path.join(), etc. (raise a TypeError or UnicodeError)
Since I've seen no objections to this yet: please no. If we offer a "lower-level" bytes filename API, it should work for all platforms.
Unfortunately, it can't. You cannot represent all possible file names in a byte string in Windows (just as you can't do so in a Unicode string on Unix).
Sorry, maybe I'm just being thick here, but I don't understand how that is possible. On the physical disk, each Windows file name must be represented by a byte string, yes? So how is it possible that there are Windows files with names that can't be represented as a byte string? What have I missed? -- Steven