[Python-ideas] Re: Add a couple of options to open()'s mode parameter to deal with common text encodings

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021, at 18:46, Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:

On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 3:29 PM Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> wrote:

...

With "t", it takes/gives Unicode objects, but with "b" it uses bytes.

Sure, in Python 3, but not in Python 2, or C.

Anyway, moral correctness is beside the point. People in point of fact don't write encoding='utf-8' when they should, because it's so much to type.

I'll say again, what if it were accepted as a positional argument? the current third positional argument is "buffering", which is an integer, but I doubt there's even much code that uses it intentionally.