[Python-Dev] Next version of PEP278 - universal newline support - available

[Paul Prescod]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> 
> someone wrote:
> 
> > (alternate idea: instead of adding a non-standard mode
> > flag, how about a "textfile" constructor?)
> 
> with the following signature, perhaps:
> 
>     f = textfile(filename, mode="r", encoding=None)

Enthusiastic +1.

But I think that encoding should default to "ASCII". We also need to
discuss under what circumstances textfile("foo").read() returns Unicode
string versus 8-bit string.

 Paul Prescod