Terry Reedy writes:
In python 2 there was no such a strong imposition [of Unicode awareness on users].
Nor is there in 3.x.
Sorry, Terry, but you're basically wrong here. True, if one sticks to pure ASCII, there's no difference to notice, but that's just not possible for people who live outside of the U.S., or who share text with people outside of the U.S. They need currency symbols, they have friends whose names have little dots on them. Every single one of those is a backtrace waiting to happen. A backtrace on f = open('text-file.txt') for line in f: pass is an imposition. That doesn't happen in 2.x (for the wrong reasons, but it's very convenient 95% of the time). This is what Victor's "locale" codec is all about. I think that's the wrong spelling for the feature, but there does need to be a way to express "don't bother me about Unicode" in most scripts for most people. We don't have a decent boilerplate for that yet.