[Python-Dev] pathlib - current status of discussions

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Random832 writes:

 > And what such incompatibilities exist between bytes and str for the
 > purpose of representing file paths?

A plethora of encodings.

 > At the end of the day, there's exactly one answer to "what file on
 > disk this represents (or would represent if it existed)".

Nope.  Suppose those bytes were read from a file or a socket?  It's
dangerous to assume that encoding matches the file system's.