On 9 January 2014 09:01, Mark Shannon <m...@hotpy.org> wrote: > On 09/01/14 00:07, Ben Finney wrote: >> >> Kristján Valur Jónsson <krist...@ccpgames.com> writes: >> >>> Believe it or not, sometimes you really don't care about encodings. >>> Sometimes you just want to parse text files. >> >> >> Files don't contain text, they contain bytes. Bytes only become text >> when filtered through the correct encoding. >> > I'm glad someone pointed this out.
Try working on Windows with Powershell as your default shell for a while. You learn that message *very* fast. You end up with a mix of CP1250 and UTF-16 files, and you can no longer even assume that a file of "simple text" is in an ASCII-compatible encoding. After tools like grep fail to work often enough, you get a really strong sense of why knowing the encoding matters (and you feel this urge to rewrite all the GNU tools in Python 3 ;-)). And that's on a single PC in an English-speaking locale :-( (You also get this fun with the £ sign being encoded differently in the console and the GUI). So it's not just people that "use funny foreign languages" (apologies to 99% of the globe for that :-)) who are affected. I assume Kristján knows all this, given the "á" in his name :-) But certainly just using open without specifying an encoding has always served me fine in Python 3, in the sense that it does at least as well as Python 2 So I think that if this discussion is to be of any real benefit, a specific example is needed. I honestly don't think I've ever encountered a case where "Sometimes [I] just want to parse text files" and code that uses the default encoding (i.e., looks pretty much identical to Python 2) has *failed* to do the job for me. PEP460 is addressing a very specific use case, and certainly isn't for "just parsing text files" - at least as I understand it. Paul. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
