[Python-Dev] Improve open() to support reading file starting with an unicode BOM

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Jan 7, 2010, at 7:52 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 4:10 PM, Victor Stinner
> <victor.stinner at haypocalc.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Builtin open() function is unable to open an UTF-16/32 file starting with a
>> BOM if the encoding is not specified (raise an unicode error). For an UTF-8
>> file starting with a BOM, read()/readline() returns also the BOM whereas the
>> BOM should be "ignored".

> I'm a little hesitant about this. First of all, UTF-8 + BOM is crazy
> talk. And for the other two, perhaps it would make more sense to have
> a separate encoding-guessing function that takes a binary stream and
> returns a text stream wrapping it with the proper encoding?

It *is* crazy, but unfortunately rather common.  Wikipedia has a good description of the issues: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Byte-order_mark>.  Basically, some Windows text APIs will emit a UTF-8 "BOM" in order to identify the file as being UTF-8, so it's become a convention to do that.  That's not good enough, so you need to guess the encoding as well to make sure, but if there is a BOM and you can otherwise verify that the file is probably UTF-8 encoded, you should discard it.

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