winsound.PlaySound should accept pathlib.Path instances

[Julian-O]

BPO	46905
Nosy	@pfmoore, @tjguk, @zware, @eryksun, @zooba, @Julian-O

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

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GitHub fields:

assignee = None
closed_at = None
created_at = <Date 2022-03-03.00:02:59.656>
labels = ['easy', 'type-feature', 'library', 'OS-windows', '3.11']
title = 'winsound.PlaySound should accept pathlib.Path instances'
updated_at = <Date 2022-03-03.06:53:50.243>
user = 'https://github.com/Julian-O'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2022-03-03.06:53:50.243>
actor = 'eryksun'
assignee = 'none'
closed = False
closed_date = None
closer = None
components = ['Library (Lib)', 'Windows']
creation = <Date 2022-03-03.00:02:59.656>
creator = 'Julian-O'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 46905
keywords = ['easy (C)']
message_count = 2.0
messages = ['414393', '414408']
nosy_count = 6.0
nosy_names = ['paul.moore', 'tim.golden', 'zach.ware', 'eryksun', 'steve.dower', 'Julian-O']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'normal'
resolution = None
stage = 'needs patch'
status = 'open'
superseder = None
type = 'enhancement'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue46905'
versions = ['Python 3.11']

[Julian-O]

The library function winsound.PlaySound takes a sound parameter. One of the valid arguments is a path to a WAV filename.

Since Python 3.4, paths can be cleanly represented with PathLib.Path instances.

However, if you pass a Path instance to PlaySound, it responds with:

TypeError: 'sound' must be str or None, not 'WindowsPath'

This can be quickly fixed in the caller by passing str(the_path_instance) instead, but it would be cleaner if PlaySound accepted Python's preferred method of representing paths.

[eryksun]

PlaySound() is implemented by the C function winsound_PlaySound_impl() in "PC/winsound.c". To support pathlike objects, it could use soundname = PyOS_FSPath(sound), and require soundname to be a Unicode string via PyUnicode_Check(soundname). Or it could more generically support any buffer or pathlike object via PyUnicode_FSDecoder(sound, &soundname). This call decodes byte strings using the filesystem encoding, which is UTF-8 unless legacy ANSI mode is enabled.

[moribellamy]

I'm interested in trying this issue. What's an appropriate way to test the fix in CI? I'm assuming manual testing will be straightforward (just build the binary and have a simple script that tries to use a PathLib.Path instead of a string)

[zware]

About the best you can do is replicate this test:

cpython/Lib/test/test_winsound.py

Lines 115 to 117 in f33e2c8

	def test_snd_filename(self):
	fn = support.findfile('pluck-pcm8.wav', subdir='audiodata')
	safe_PlaySound(fn, winsound.SND_FILENAME | winsound.SND_NODEFAULT)

and pass in pathlib.Path(fn) instead of just fn.