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

[Georg Brandl]

Am 08.01.2010 22:14, schrieb Tres Seaver:

>> FWIW, I'm personally in favor of using the UTF-8 signature. If people
>> consider them crazy talk, that may be because UTF-8 can't possibly have
>> a byte order - hence I call it a signature, not the BOM. As a signature,
>> I don't consider it crazy at all. There is a long tradition of having
>> magic bytes in files (executable files, Postscript, PDF, ... - see
>> /etc/magic). Having a magic byte sequence for plain text to denote the
>> encoding is useful and helps reducing moji-bake. This is the reason it's
>> used on Windows: notepad would normally assume that text is in the ANSI
>> code page, and for compatibility, it can't stop doing that. So the UTF-8
>> signature gives them an exit strategy.
> 
> Agreed.  Having that marker at the start of the file makes interop with
> other tools *much* easier.

Except if only 50% of the other tools support the signature.

Georg

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