Bugs Rust Won’t Catch - Zig Strings

[squeek502]

I’d argue that’d be learning the wrong lesson. IMO the lesson is really “you need to think things through when it comes to paths”; making any blind choice can and likely will lead to problems.

My full thoughts can be found here. This bit is particularly relevant:

@squeek502

[…] there is no canonical/portable way to format an arbitrary path as valid UTF-8 (i.e. invalid UTF-8 sequences can be converted into � using a variety of algorithms, but the user cannot ever use that output to reconstruct the actual path)

For Zig, in #19005 I added std.fs.path.fmtAsUtf8Lossy and std.fs.path.fmtWtf16LeAsUtf8Lossy.

However, that may not be the way you want to print paths depending on your use case. For example, ls on Linux prints them shell-escaped:

$ touch `echo 'FF FF FF FF' | xxd -r -p`
$ ls
''$'\377\377\377\377'