Hello, CPython 2.x (and 3.x) under Win32 has an issue with sys.argv. The list is computed using the ANSI version of the windows APIs[*]. The problem is apparent when you have a file/directory which can't be represented in the system encoding (eg: a japanese-named file or directory on a Western Windows), because the Windows ANSI API will encode the filename to the system encoding using what we call the "replace" policy, and sys.argv[] will contain an entry like "c:\\foo\\??????????????.dat".
At the moment, there's simply no way of passing such a file to a Python script/application as an argument (eg: if you double-click on that file, and the file is associated to a Python application). This is a wide- spread problem among Python applications; eg. if you click on a Japanese .torrent file, ABC (a Bittorent client written in Python) won't be able to open it and will complain "cannot access file ??????????.torrent". I understand that fixing this properly in the 2.x serie might have backward compatibility issues, but I propose that this be fixed at least in the Python 3.x serie, and I volunteer to write a patch. I would be glad if someone expert with ANSI/Unicode/Windows (MvL?) would show me what he believes being the correct way of approaching this problem. My suggestion is that: * At the Python level, we still expose a single sys.argv[], which will contain unicode strings. I think this exactly matches what Py3k does now. (Back in the time, there were proposals to add a sys.argvu, but I guess it does not make sense right now). * At the C level, I believe it involves using GetCommandLineW() and CommandLineToArgvW() in WinMain.c, but should Py_Main/PySys_SetArgv() be changed to also accept wchar_t** arguments? Or is it better to allow for NULL to be passed (under Windows at least), so that the Windows code-path in there can use GetCommandLineW()/CommandLineToArgvW() to get the current process' arguments? Thanks! [*] In detail: it actually comes from __argc/__argv (see WinMain.c), which in turn are computed by the CRT startup code, which would adapt to user's choice but Python is being compiled in ANSI mode. -- Giovanni Bajo _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
