[Python-Dev] PEP 383 update: utf8b is now the error handler

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

"Martin v. Löwis" writes:

 > I fail to see how this could ever matter. If, by "media", you mean
 > things like removable disks, and the file name encoding used on them,
 > it's fairly irrelevant for the PEP, since Python won't start using
 > Shift JIS as its file system encoding just because that's the encoding
 > used on the disk.

I'm sorry for the lack of clarity of my posts, but somehow you're
completely missing the point.  The point is precisely that Python
*won't* use Shift JIS as the file system encoding (if it did there
would be no problem with reading Shift JIS), but the people who
created the media *did*.

Now, with Python's file system encoding == UTF-8 or any packed EUC,
and more than a handful of Shift JIS or Big5 characters in file names,
one is *almost certain* to encounter ASCII as the second byte of a
multibyte sequence.  PEP 383 can't handle this, but it is sure to be
the most common use case for PEP 383 in East Asia.