On 2008-09-30 18:46, Guido van Rossum wrote: > On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 8:20 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> In the end, I think it's better not to be clever and just return >> the filenames that cannot be decoded as bytes objects in os.listdir(). > > Unfortunately that's going to break most code that is using > os.listdir(), so it's hardly an improved experience.
Right, but this also signals a problem to the application and the application is in the best position to determine a proper work-around. >> Passing those to open() will then open the files as expected, in most >> other cases the application will have to provide explicit conversions >> in whatever way best fits the application. > > In most cases the app will try to concatenate a pathname given as a > string and then it will fail. True, and that's the right thing to do in those cases. The application will have to deal with the problem, e.g. convert the path to bytes and retry the joining, or convert the bytes string to Latin-1 and then convert the result back to bytes (using Latin-1) for passing it to open() (which will of course only work if there are no non-Latin-1 characters in the path dir), or apply a different filename encoding based on the path and then retry to convert the bytes filename into Unicode, or ask the user what to do, etc. There are many possibilities to solve the problem, apply a work-around, or inform the user of ways to correct it. >> Also note that os.listdir() isn't the only source of filesnames. You >> often read them from a file, a database, some socket, etc, so letting >> the application decide what to do is not asking too much, IMHO. > > In all those cases, the code that reads them is responsible for > picking an encoding or relying on a default encoding, and the > resulting filenames are always expressed as text, not bytes. I don't > think it's the same at all. What I was trying to say is that you run into the same problem in other places as well. Trying to have os.listdir() implement some strategy is not going to solve the problem at large. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Sep 30 2008) >>> Python/Zope Consulting and Support ... http://www.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC.Zope.Database.Adapter ... http://zope.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ... http://python.egenix.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ :::: Try mxODBC.Zope.DA for Windows,Linux,Solaris,MacOSX for free ! :::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
