[Python-Dev] PEP 383: Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

"Martin v. Löwis" writes:

 > I find the case pretty artificial, though: if the locale encoding
 > changes, all file names will look incorrect to the user, so he'll
 > quickly switch back, or rename all the files.

It's not necessarily the case that the locale encoding changes, but
rather the name of the file.  I have a couple of directories where I
have Japanese in both EUC-JP and UTF-8, for example.  (The
applications where I never bothered to do a conversion from EUC to
UTF-8 are things like stripping MIME attachments from messages and
saving them to files when I changed my default.)

So I have a little Emacs Lisp function that tries EUC or UTF8
depending on date and falls back to the other on a decode error.

Another possible situation would be a user program in the user's
locale communicating with a daemon running in some other locale (quite
likely POSIX).

So while out of scope of the PEP, I don't think it's at all
artificial.