[Python-Dev] unicode imports

Sat Jun 17 18:04:54 CEST 2006

On 17-jun-2006, at 6:44, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> Bob Ippolito wrote:
>> There's a similar issue in that if sys.prefix contains a colon, 
>> Python
>> is also busted:
>> http://python.org/sf/1507224
>>>> Of course, that's not a Windows issue, but it is everywhere else. The
>> offending code in that case is Modules/getpath.c,
>> Since it has to do with the definition of Py_GetPath as returning a 
> single
> string that is really a DELIM separated list of strings, where 
> DELIM is
> defined by the current platform (';' on Windows, ':' everywhere 
> else), this
> seems more like a platform problem than a Python problem, though - 
> you can't
> have directories containing a colon as an entry in PATH or 
> PYTHONPATH either.
> It's not really Python's fault that the platform defines a legal 
> filename
> character as the delimiter for path entries.

On unix-y systems any character except the NUL byte can be used in a 
legal fileystem path, that leaves awfully little characters to use as 
delimiter without risking issues like the one in the bug Bob mentioned.
>> The only real alternative I can see is to normalise Py_GetPath to 
> always
> return a ';' delimited list of strings, regardless of platform, and 
> update
> PySys_SetPath accordingly. That'd cause potential compatibility 
> problems for
> embedded interpreters, though.

That wouldn't help, ';' is also a valid character in filenames on 
Unix. Except for accepting the status quo (which is a perfectly fine 
alternative) there seem to be two valid ways to solve this problem. 
You can either define Py_GetPath2 that returns a python list or 
tuple, or introduce some way of quoting the delimiter. Both would be 
backward incompatible.
Ronald