[Python-Dev] Bytes path support

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Nick Coghlan writes:

 > One idea I had along those lines is a surrogatereplace error handler (
 > http://bugs.python.org/issue22016) that emitted an ASCII question mark for
 > each smuggled byte, rather than propagating the encoding problem.

Please, don't.

"Smuggled bytes" are not independent events.  They tend to be
correlated *within* file names, and this handler would generate names
whose human semantics get lost (and there *are* human semantics,
otherwise the name would be str(some_counter)).  They tend to be
correlated across file names, and this handler will generate multiple
files with the same munged name (and again, the differentiating human
semantics get lost).

If you don't know the semantics of the intended file names, you can't
generate good replacement names.  This has to be an application-level
function, and often requires user intervention to get good names.

If you want to provide helper functions that applications can use to
clean names explicitly, that might be OK.