[slavik81]

You're right that I'm frustrated. I'm not even upset at anyone in this thead, but from previous discussions. I appologise for carrying that baggage here. Having my morality questioned when I legitimately want to make programs work correctly for foreign languages has left me... emotional on this subject.

Unix has its own problems, but the program avian wrote works correctly on Linux. Most encoding issues I encountered when working with Python 3 were on Windows.

PEP 383 was making the best of a bad situation without breaking the API again. The real mistake was having the functions return strings in 3.0. The operating system APIs should have returned path objects that require an explicit conversion to string with an explicit error handling mechanism.

Python gives you all the tools you need to do this right, but they're easy to unknowingly use in ways that break on corner cases. A well-defined API should guide you towards the correct solution and should make pitfalls obvious.

In any case, I should probably give it a rest. I work hard to make sure my programs do this stuff right, and I suppose that's all I can really do.