[Python-Dev] Bytes path related questions for Guido

[Guido van Rossum]

Yes on #1 -- making the low-level functions more usable for edge cases by
supporting bytes seems fine (as long as the support for strings, where it
exists, is not compromised).

The status of pathlib is a little unclear to me -- is there a plan to
eventually support bytes or not?

For #2 I think you should probably just work with the others you have
mentioned.


On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 9:44 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> At Guido's request, splitting out two specific questions from Serhiy's
> thread where I believe we could do with an explicit "yes or no" from
> him.
>
> 1. Should we accept patches adding support for the direct use of bytes
> paths in lower level filesystem manipulation APIs? (i.e. everything
> that isn't pathlib)
>
> This was Serhiy's original question (due to some open issues [1,2]). I
> think the answer is yes, as we already do in some cases, and the
> "pathlib doesn't support binary paths" design decision is a high level
> platform independent API vs low level potentially platform dependent
> API one rather than being about disallowing the use of bytes paths in
> general.
>
> [1] http://bugs.python.org/issue19997
> [2] http://bugs.python.org/issue20797
>
> 2. Should we add some additional helpers to the string module for
> dealing with surrogate escaped bytes and other techniques for
> smuggling arbitrary binary data as text?
>
> My proposal [3] is to add:
>
> * string.escaped_surrogates (constant with the 128 escaped code points)
> * string.clean(s): replaces surrogates with '\ufffd' or another
> specified code point
> * string.redecode(s, encoding): encodes a string back to bytes and
> then decodes it again using the specified encoding (the old encoding
> defaults to 'latin-1' to match the assumptions in WSGI)
>
> "s != string.clean(s)" would then serve as a check for "does this
> string contain any surrogate escaped bytes?"
>
> [3] http://bugs.python.org/issue18814#msg225791
>
> Regards,
> Nick.
>
> --
> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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