[Python-Dev] [Python-3000] New proposition for Python3 bytes filename issue

[Georg Brandl]

Guido van Rossum schrieb:
> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 10:28 AM, Georg Brandl <g.brandl at gmx.net> wrote:
>>> How can it *regularly* drive you crazy when "the majority of fie names
>>> [...] encoded correctly" (as you assert above)?
>>
>> Because Office files are a) often named with long, seemingly descriptive
>> filenames, which invariably means umlauts in German, and b) often sent around
>> between systems, creating encoding problems.
> 
> Gotcha.

Which means?

>> Having seen how much controversy returning an invalid Unicode string sparks,
>> and given that it really isn't obvious to the newbie either, I think I now agree
>> that dropping filenames when calling a listdir() that returns Unicode filenames
>> is the best solution. I'm a little uneasy with having one function for both
>> bytes and Unicode return, because that kind of str/unicode mixing I thought we
>> had left behind in 2.x, but of course can live with it.
> 
> Well, the *current* Py3k behavior where it may return a mix of bytes
> and str instances is really messy, and likely to trip up most code
> that doesn't expect it in a way that makes it hard to debug. However
> the *proposed* behavior (returns bytes if the arg was bytes, and
> returns str when the arg was str) is IMO sane, and no different than
> the polymorphism found in len() or many builtin operations.

I agree that everything is better than the current behavior.

Georg

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