[Python-Dev] Filename as byte string in python 2.6 or 3.0?

[glyph at divmod.com]

On 06:16 pm, guido at python.org wrote:
>On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 11:12 AM,  <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:
>>The one thing it doesn't do is expose the decoding rules for the 
>>higher-
>>level applications to deal with.  I am pretty sure I don't understand 
>>how
>>the interaction between filesystem encoding and user locale works in 
>>that
>>case, though, so I can't immediately recommend a way to do it.
>
>You can ask what the filesystem encoding is with
>sys.getfilesystemencoding(). On my Linux box I can make this return
>anything I like by setting LC_CTYPE=en_US.<whatever> (as long as
><whatever> is a recognized encoding). There are probably 5 other
>environment variables to influence this. :-(

Only 5?  Great! :-)
>Of course that doesn't help for undecodable filenames, and in that
>case I don't think *anything* can help you unless you have a lot of
>additional knowledge about what the user might be doing, e.g. you know
>a few other encodings to try that make sense for their environment.

There are other ways to glean this knowledge; for example, looking at 
the 'iocharset' or 'nls' mount options supplied to mount various 
filesystems.  I thought maybe Python (or some C library call) might be 
invoking some logic that did something with data like that; if not, 
great, one day when I have some free time (meaning: never) I can 
implement that logic myself without duplicating a bunch of work.