Hi, all. I believe UTF-8 should be chosen by default for text encoding.
* The default encoding for Python source file is UTF-8. * VS Code and even notepad uses UTF-8 by default. * Text files downloaded from the Internet is probably UTF-8. * UTF-8 is used when you use WSL regardless your system code page. * Windows 10 (1903) adds per-process option to change active code page to UTF-8 and call the system code page "legacy". [1] But it is difficult to change the default text encoding of Python for backward compatibility. So I want to recommend the UTF-8 mode: * The default text encoding become UTF-8 * When you need to use legacy ANSI code page, you can use "mbcs" codec. * You can disable it when you need to run Python application relying on the legacy system encoding. But it is not well known yet. And setting the environment variable is a bit difficult for people who are learning programming with Python. So I want to propose this: 1. Recommend it in the official document "Using Python on Windows" [2]. 2. Show the UTF-8 mode status in the command line mode header [3] on Windows. 3. Show the link to the UTF-8 mode document in the command line mode header too. 4. Add checkbox to set "PYTHONUTF8=1" environment variable in the installer. How do you think? If setting "PYTHONUTF8=1" environment variable is too danger to recommend widely, we may be able to add per-installation (and per-venv if needed) option file (site.cfg in the directory same to python.exe) to enable UTF-8 mode. But it may make Python startup process more complex... Regards, [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/globalizing/use-utf8-code-page [2]: https://docs.python.org/3/using/windows.html [3]: Currently, Python version and "Type "help",..." are printed. -- Inada Naoki <songofaca...@gmail.com> _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- python-ideas@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-ideas-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-ideas@python.org/message/524JQFZ4RMRLU7DBPSQDR735Z2UMSWQG/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
