[New-bugs-announce] [issue43403] Misleading statement about bytes not being able to represent windows filenames in documentation

[Gregory P. Smith]

New submission from Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org>:

As noted in the comment on https://github.com/rdiff-backup/rdiff-backup/issues/540#issuecomment-789485896

The Python documentation in https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.path.html makes an odd claim that bytes cannot represent all file names on Windows.  That doesn't make sense.  bytes can by definition represent everything.

"""Vice versa, using bytes objects cannot represent all file names on Windows (in the standard mbcs encoding), hence Windows applications should use string objects to access all files."""

Could we get this clarified and corrected to cover what any actual technical limitation is?

Every OS is going to reject some bytes objects as a pathname for containing invalid byte sequences for their filesystem (ex: I doubt any OS allows null b'\0' characters).  But lets not claim that bytes cannot represent everything on a filesystem with an encoding.

----------
assignee: docs at python
components: Documentation
messages: 388122
nosy: docs at python, gregory.p.smith, steve.dower
priority: normal
severity: normal
stage: needs patch
status: open
title: Misleading statement about bytes not being able to represent windows filenames in documentation
versions: Python 3.10, Python 3.7, Python 3.8, Python 3.9

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue43403>
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