>>> sys.version
'2.3.3 (#51, Dec 18 2003, 20:22:39) [MSC v.1200 32 bit
(Intel)]'
>>> sys.platform
'win32'
>>> sys.getwindowsversion()
(5, 1, 2600, 2, '')

Hi.
In the documentation it is reported that:
'On Windows NT+, file names are Unicode natively, so no
conversion is performed'. 

But:
import sys
>>> sys.getfilesystemencoding()
'mbcs'



Thanks and regards   Manlio Perillo

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The documentation is correct. Filenames are not converted.

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I'm not an expert but... mbcs is the encoding used by
Windows 9x.
This is not clear, if the encoding for win NT+ is 'mbcs'
this should be written in the documentation explicitly.

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When filenames need to be converted between byte strings and
unicode strings, "mbcs" is the right encoding even on
Windows NT. Python rarely needs to perform this conversion,
as it passes Unicode strings directly to the operating
system. It might be that applications have the need to
perform the conversion themselves.

I have added a comment in this direction in libsys.tex 1.72.