[Python-Dev] Unicode strings as filenames

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Martin v. Loewis wrote:

>>We'd still need to support other OSes as well, though, and I
>>don't think that putting all this code into fileobject.c is
>>a good idea -- after all opening files is needed by some other
>>parts of Python as well and may also be useful for extensions.
>>
> 
> The stuff isn't in fileobject.c. Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding
> is defined in bltinmodule.c.


That's the global, sure but the code using it is scattered
across fileobject.c and the posix module. I think it would be
a good idea to put all this file naming code into some
Python/fileapi.c file which then also provides C APIs for
extensions to use. These APIs should then take the file name
as PyObject* rather than char* to enable them to handle
Unicode directly.


> Also, on other OSes: You can pass Unicode object to open on all
> systems. If Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding is NULL, it will fall back to
> site.encoding.
> 
> Of course, if the system has an open function that expects wchar_t*,
> we might want to use that instead of going through a codec. Off hand,
> Win32 seems to be the only system where this might work, and even
> there, it won't work on Win95.


I expect this to become a standard in the next few years.

 
>>I'd suggest to implement something similiar to the DLL loading
>>code which is also implemented as subsystem in Python.
>>
> 
> I'd say this is over-designed. It is not that there are ten
> alternative approaches to doing encodings in file names, and we only
> support two of them, but it is rather that there are only two, and we
> support all three of them :-)
> 
> Also, it is more difficult than threads: for threads, there is a fixed
> set of API features that need to be represented. Doing Py_UNICODE*
> opening alone is easy, but look at the number of posixmodule functions
> that all expect file names of some sort.


Doesn't that support the idea of having a small subsystem
in Python which exposes the Unicode aware APIs to Python
and its extensions ?

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
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