On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 7:19 AM Christopher Barker <python...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Getting a bit OT, but I *think* this is the story: > > I've heard it argued, by folks that want to write Python software that uses > bytes for filenames, that: > > A file path on a *nix system can be any string of bytes, except two special > values: > > b'\x00' : null > b'\x2f' : slash > > (consistent with this SO post, among many other sources: > https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/39175/understanding-unix-file-name-encoding) > > So any encoding will work, as long as those two values mean the right thing. > Practically, null is always null, so that leaves the slash > > So any encoding that uses b'\x2f' for the slash would work. Which seems to > include, for instance, UTF-16: > > In [31]: "/".encode('utf-16') > Out[31]: b'\xff\xfe/\x00'
Nope, see above about b'\x00' :) > In practice, maybe knowing that it's ascii compatible in the first 127 bytes > will get pretty far... That's exactly what "ASCII compatible" means. Since ASCII is a seven-bit encoding, an encoding is ASCII-compatible if (a) every ASCII character is represented by the corresponding byte value, and (b) every seven-bit value represents that ASCII character. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/CJ5W3MHSU2YO4U5VHF2T4K2EYYMB32KU/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
