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Passing a unicode filename to aifc.open() results in the argument being treated like a filepointer instead of opening the file.
The argument check,
http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/default/Lib/aifc.py#l332
only checks if the argument is a str. Should this be extended to accept all string-type objects?
Example usage:
>>> import aifc
>>> aifc.open(u"/some/path")
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
 File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/aifc.py", line 924, in open
 return Aifc_read(f)
 File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/aifc.py", line 335, in __init__
 self.initfp(f)
 File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/aifc.py", line 286, in initfp
 chunk = Chunk(file)
 File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/chunk.py", line 61, in __init__
 self.chunkname = file.read(4)
AttributeError: 'unicode' object has no attribute 'read'

Since this problem is specific to 2.7, the offending line is actually http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/2.7/Lib/aifc.py#l344:
344 if type(f) == type(''):

I've attached a patch with a test case.

My fellow coredevs confirm that this would be a new feature, so it's out of scope for 2.7 (which is in bugfix-only mode). It's also deterministic in the sense that you can easily work around it by encoding the unicode filename to the filesystem encoding first.
Closing as wontfix.