Message6315

Alex is right. Our import system is converting sys.path items to java Strings via item.__str__().toString(). CPython in this case converts unicode to strings by encoding them via the filesystem encoding.

We don't support a filesystem encoding on Jython (at this point anyway). Instead we've just been 'passing thru' unicode when it's requested (e.g. os.listdir).

That is technically broken (you could end up with a plain str where ord(somestr[0]) > 255) but I think we'll continue getting away with this strategy until 2.6. This is one of the few leftover str/unicode weirdness bits carried over from 2.2 where unicode and str were pretty much the same object