On 2020-09-13 11:57, Christopher Barker wrote:
On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 7:58 AM Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp <mailto:turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp>> wrote:
> encoding=None: this is the important one -- json is always UTF-8 yes?
Standard JSON is always UTF-8. Nevertheless, I'm quite sure that there's a ton of Japanese in Shift JIS, including some produced by default in Python on Windows. I'll bet the same is true of GBK for Chinese, and maybe even ISO-8859-1 in Europe.
So what should the json lib do with these? It could have an encoding parameter with utf-8 as default. Or it could require that the user open the file themselves if it's not UTF-8.
BTW: I noticed that json.loads() takes:
Deserialize ``s`` (a ``str``, ``bytes`` or ``bytearray`` instance containing a JSON document) to a Python object.
A str is an str (already Unicode, yes?) -- but for bytes, it must be assuming some encoding, presumably UTF-8, but it doesn't seem to have a way to specify one -- so this is already a missing feature.
It's not a missing feature, because the JSON spec requires UTF-8. If it's not UTF-8, it's invalid JSON. If a user wants to handle a file that looks sort of like JSON but technically isn't because it's not UTF-8, it's on the user to first convert the file to UTF-8 before bringing JSON into the picture. -- Brendan Barnwell "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail." --author unknown