[Python-Dev] Defining a path protocol

[Ethan Furman]

On 04/08/2016 04:05 PM, Koos Zevenhoven wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 12:53 AM, Brett Cannon wrote:
>> On Fri, 8 Apr 2016 at 14:23 Koos Zevenhoven wrote:
>>
>> At this point no one wants to touch bytes paths. If you need that level of
>> control because of multiple encodings within a single file system then you
>> will probably have to stick with managing bytes paths on your own to get the
>> encoding right.
>
> What does this mean? I assume you don't mean os.path.* would stop
> dealing with bytes?

No, it does not mean that.  It means the stuff in place won't change, 
but the stuff we're adding now to integrate with Path will only support 
str (which is one reason why os.path isn't going to die).

> And if not, then you seem to mean that os.fspath
> would do nothing except call .__fspath__().

Fair point.  So it should be something like this:

def fspath(thing):
     # look for path attribute
     string = getattr(thing, '__fspath__', None)
     if string is not None:
         return string
     # not found, do we have a str or bytes object?
     if isinstance(thing, (str, bytes)):
         return thing
     raise TypeError('`thing` must implement the __fspath__ protocol or 
be an instance of str or bytes')


>> And just because DirEntry supports bytes doesn't mean that any magic method
>> it gains has to carry that forward (it can always raise a TypeError if
>> necessary).
>
> No, but what if some code gets pathnames from whatever other places
> and passes them on to os.scandir. Whenever it happens to get a bytes
> path, a TypeError gets raised, but only when it picks one of the
> DirEntry objects and for instance tries to open(...) it. Of course,
> I'm not sure how common this is.

Yeah, I don't think this is a good idea.  Given that fspath() should be 
able to return bytes if bytes are passed in,  DirEntry's __fspath__ 
could return bytes to no ill effect.

I realize this may not be ideal, but throwing bytes to the wind is going 
to bite us in the end.

After all, the idea is to make these things work with the stdlib, and 
the stdlib accepts bytes for path strings.

--
~Ethan~