On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 8:51 PM Inada Naoki <songofaca...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 10:22 AM Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org>
> wrote:
> > Older Pythons may be easy to drop, but I'm not so sure about older
> unofficial docs. The open() function is very popular and there must be
> millions of blog posts with examples using it, most of them reading text
> files (written by bloggers naive in Python but good at SEO).
> >
> > I would be very sad if the official recommendation had to become "[for
> the most common case] avoid open(filename), use open_text(filename)".
>
> I agree that. But until we switch to the default encoding of open(),
> we must recommend to avoid `open(filename)` anyway.
> The default encoding of VS Code, Atom, Notepad is already UTF-8.
Maybe we're overthinking this - do we really need to recommend avoiding
`open(filename)` in all cases? Isn't it just fine to use if
`locale.getpreferredencoding(False)` is UTF-8, since in that case there
won't be any change in behavior when `open` switches from the old,
locale-specific default to the new, always UTF-8 default?
If that's the case, then it would be less of a backwards incompatibility
issue, since most production environments will already be using UTF-8 as
the locale (by virtue of it being the norm on Unix systems and servers).
And if that's the case, all we need is a warning that is raised
conditionally when open() is called for text mode without an explicit
encoding when the system locale is not UTF-8, and that warning can say
something like:
Your system is currently configured to use shift_jis for text files.
Beginning in Python 3.13, open() will always use utf-8 for text files
instead.
For compatibility with future Python versions, pass open() the extra
argument:
encoding="shift_jis"
~Matt
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