[Python-Dev] pathlib - current status of discussions

[Nick Coghlan]

On 14 April 2016 at 22:16, Victor Stinner <victor.stinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2016-04-13 19:10 GMT+02:00 Brett Cannon <brett at python.org>:
>> https://gist.github.com/brettcannon/b3719f54715787d54a206bc011869aa1 has the
>> four potential approaches implemented (although it doesn't follow the
>> "separate functions" approach some are proposing and instead goes with the
>> allow_bytes approach I originally proposed).
>
> IMHO the best argument against the flavor 4 (fspath: str or bytes
> allowed) is the os.path.join() function.
>
> I consider that the final goal of the whole discussion is to support
> something like:
>
>     path = os.path.join(pathlib_path, "str_path", direntry)

That's not a *new* problem though, it already exists if you pass in a
mix of bytes and str:

>>> import os.path
>>> os.path.join("str", b"bytes")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.4/posixpath.py", line 89, in join
    "components") from None
TypeError: Can't mix strings and bytes in path components

There's also already a solution (regardless of whether you want bytes
or str as the result), which is to explicitly coerce all the arguments
to the same type:

>>> os.path.join(*map(os.fsdecode, ("str", b"bytes")))
'str/bytes'
>>> os.path.join(*map(os.fsencode, ("str", b"bytes")))
b'str/bytes'

Assuming os.fsdecode and os.fsencode are updated to call os.fspath on
their argument before continuing with the current logic, the latter
two forms would both start automatically handling both DirEntry and
pathlib objects, while the first form would continue to throw
TypeError if handed an unexpected bytes value (whether directly or via
an __fspath__ call).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia