On Tue, Jan 26, 2021 at 10:22 AM Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
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> 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).
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> I would be very sad if the official recommendation had to become "[for the most common case] avoid open(filename), use open_text(filename)".
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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 need to update the tutorial (*) to use `encoding="utf-8"`.
Telling people to always add `encoding='utf8'` makes much more sense to me than introducing a new function and telling them to do that.