More bytes vs. strings documentation.

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Doc/library/os.path.rst b/Doc/library/os.path.rst
index 9bf5ae75fc..71eeb533bc 100644
--- a/Doc/library/os.path.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/os.path.rst
@@ -10,7 +10,14 @@
 
 This module implements some useful functions on pathnames. To read or
 write files see :func:`open`, and for accessing the filesystem see the
-:mod:`os` module.
+:mod:`os` module. The path parameters can be passed as either strings,
+or bytes. Applications are encouraged to represent file names as
+(Unicode) character strings. Unfortunately, some file names may not be
+representable as strings on Unix, so applications that need to support
+arbitrary file names on Unix should use bytes objects to represent
+path names. Vice versa, using bytes objects cannot represent all file
+names on Windows (in the standard ``mbcs`` encoding), hence Windows
+applications should use string objects to access all files.
 
 .. warning::