[Python-Dev] Unicode strings as filenames

[Jack Jansen]

Off on a slight tangent:
On Mac OS X the default 8-bit encoding is UTF8. os.listdir() handles
this fine and so does open(). The OS does all the hard work for you:
it knows that some mounted disks may be in other 8-bit encodings (such
as MacRoman or MacJapanese for old mac disks, or probably latin-1 for NFS
filesystems, or god-knows-what for SMB mounted disks) and handles the
conversion.

But in Python (unix-Python we're talking here, not MacPython),
unicode(filename) fails, because site.encoding is "ascii".

Would it be safe to set site.encoding to utf8 on Mac OS X by default? 
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