[Python-Dev] Patch for an initial support of bytes filename in Python3

[glyph at divmod.com]

On 05:56 pm, guido at python.org wrote:
>On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 10:59 AM,  <glyph at divmod.com> wrote:
>>On 02:32 pm, guido at python.org wrote:

>>In the absence of a 2.6 getcwdb, perhaps the fixer could just drop the
>>"benefit of the doubt" case?  It could always be added to 2.7, and the
>>parity release of 2to3 could have a --2.7 switch that would modify the
>>behavior of this and other fixers.
>
>I'm not sure what you're proposing. *My* proposal is that 2to3 changes
>os.getcwdu() calls to os.getcwd() and leaves os.getcwd() calls alone
>-- there's no way to tell whether os.getcwdb() would be a better
>match, and for portable code, it won't be (since os.getcwdb() is a
>Unix-only thing).

My proposal is simply to change getcwd to getcwdb, and getcwdu to 
getcwd.  This preserves whatever bytes/text behavior you are expecting 
from 2.6 into 3.0.  Granted, the fact that unicode is really always the 
right thing to do on Windows complicates things.

I already tend to avoid os.getcwd() though, and this is just one more 
reason to avoid it.  In the rare cases where I really do need it, it 
looks like os.path.abspath(b".") / os.path.abspath(u".") will provide 
the clarity that I want.