[Python-3000] Unicode and OS strings

[Greg Ewing]

Hagen Fürstenau wrote:
> sys.argv could be of type bytes and sys.arguments (or whatever) could be 
> a function taking an encoding parameter (which defaults to UTF-8) and 
> returning strings.
> 
> Of course that's backwards incompatible and I'm not sure if it's too 
> late for something like this now.

It would be pretty disruptive to ask everyone to change
their habit of thinking of sys.argv as a list of strings.

I would suggest doing it the other way around -- have
sys.argv be an object that automatically converts to
unicode on access, and something else, such as
sys.argbytes, for getting the raw bytes if that fails.

--
Greg