R. David Murray added the comment: The decision was to deprecate 'U' *everywhere* in python3. Yes, the 2.7 method you are concerned about is broken with respect to its documentation, which is what #6759 was about originally. That issue was deemed too disruptive to the codebase to address effectively, but in fixing things properly for python3 we apparently lost track of the 2.7 bug. You can fix the problem (in a forward compatible way) by wrapping the ZipExtFile in an io.TextIOWrapper. The 2.7 documentation should be changed to address this issue and the solution. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue27037> _______________________________________