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

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 6 Dec 2008 09:18:47 am Nick Coghlan wrote:
> Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > Guido van Rossum wrote:
> >> Glob was just an example. Many use cases for directory traversal
> >> couldn't care less if they see *all* files.
> >
> > Okay.  Makes it harder to prove correct or not if I don't know what
> > the use case is :-)  I can't think of a single use case off-hand.
> >
> > Even your example of a ??.txt file making retrieval of *.py files
> > fail is a little broken.  If there was a ??.py file that was
> > undecodable the program would most likely want to know that file
> > existed.
>
> Why? Most programs won't be able to do anything with it.

But the program can report a sensible error message, so the user can fix 
the problem.

I'd rather have the Python API report errors then silence them, at least 
by default. I don't suppose it's on the table for functions to grow an 
extra argument that tells them to skip broken file names and 
environment variables? 

What I have in mind is something like:

os.listdir(path, silence_errors=False) -> list_of_strings

By default, if a filename in path is not a valid string, an exception is 
raised, with the guilty file name given in bytes as an attribute of the 
exception. If silence_errors is true, the invalid file names are 
silently skipped.



-- 
Steven