On Thursday 11 November 2010 20:50:35 you wrote: > > Even if I hate the MBCS encoding, because it replaces undecodable > > characters by similar glyphs by default, I'm not certain that it is a > > good idea to drop the bytes API. Can it be a problem to port programs > > from Python2 to Python3? Do major Python2 programs/libraries rely on the > > bytes API? > > I don't actually know for a fact, but I expect that the answer is "no". > > The questions is: where do file names typically come from? My guess > is that they come from > a) hard-coded strings in the source code > b) command line arguments/environment variables > c) directory listings > [of course, there are other ways, like GUI input, getcwd(), etc] > > In case a), you have filenames such as ".", e.g. as a parameter to > listdir or walk. These will typically be regular strings in Python 2, > which become Unicode strings in 3. You would actively need to put b"" > prefixes into the code. > > In case b), they will be Unicode strings in Python 3. > > In case c), they will be Unicode strings if the argument is a Unicode > string. So by induction, file names will be typically unicode. The > exception will be libraries/applications which make deliberate attempts > to get byte-oriented file names.
Ok, good answer. In this case, I vote +1 to remove completly the ANSI version from all Python modules. I consider the ANSI version has a compatibility layer for old applications written for MS-Dos or early versions of Windows. Even if these APIs are still widely used in C/C++ applications, the wide versions should always be preferred. Victor _______________________________________________ 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
