Access sys argv as bytes in Python 3

Question

Is there a sys.argv equivalent in python 3 that will let me read arguments as bytes?

 I have a script which accepts a bytes as its first arg, the first arg is supposed to be bytes converted from an utf8 string, sys.argv will try to decode the first arg using some encoding, which may not utf8, so the program may fail. If I can access the args without calling sys.argv, the conversion will not be done.

Can anyone help me with a solution?

Answer 1

Since on Python 3 sys.argv is encoded with the filesystem encoding, the proposed solution on the bug is to use os.fsencode:

argvb = list(map(os.fsencode, sys.argv))
 

os.fsencode encodes the string using the string using the surrogateescape encoding, which is defined in PEP-383.