[Python-Dev] Python-3.0, unicode, and os.environ

[Adam Olsen]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 1:02 PM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> I opened up bug http://bugs.python.org/issue4006 a while ago and it was
> suggested in the report that it's not a bug but a feature and so I
> should come here to see about getting the feature changed :-)
>
> I have a specific problem with os.environ and a somewhat less important
> architectural issue with the unicode/bytes handling in certain os.*
> modules.  I'll start with the important one:
>
> Currently in python3 there's no way to get at environment variables that
> are not encoded in the system default encoding.  My understanding is
> that this isn't a problem on Windows systems but on *nix this is a huge
> problem.  environment variables on *nix are a sequence of non-null
> bytes.  These bytes are almost always "characters" but they do not have
> to be.  Further, there is nothing that requires that the characters be
> in the same encoding; some of the characters could be in the UTF-8
> character set while others are in latin-1, shift-jis, or big-5.

Multiple encoding environments are best described as "batshit insane".
 It's impossible to handle any of it correctly *as text*, which is why
UTF-8 is becoming a universal standard.  For everybody's sanity python
should continue to push it.

However, some pragmatism is also possible.  Many uses of PATH may
allow it to be treated as black-box bytes, rather than text.  The
minimal solution I see is to make os.getenv() and os.putenv() switch
to byte modes when given byte arguments, as os.listdir() does.  This
use case doesn't require the ability to iterate over all environment
variables, as os.environb would allow.

I do wonder if controlling the environment given to a subprocess
requires os.environb, but it may be too obscure to really matter.

-- 
Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus